If I Were

There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening.  I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved.  Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be  here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them.

If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind.

Though we can't see it, we all spin, for we twirl as the earth dances it's daily rhythm and its yearly cycle around the sun.  If that's not astonishing enough. I don't know what is. Okay, maybe this - the human capacity to be loving and loved.  Now that is a force to be reckoned with, along with the other great forces of the universe:  centripetal, centrifugal, and gravity. Without all these forces we would lose our center and our grounding. Without them we would also lose the ability to fly off from the center to know something other than our more intimate circles. 

I'm glad we are of the spinning kind.

Whispered Poem

I have been risky in my endeavors,

I have been steadfast in my loves;

Oh Lord, consider these when you judge me.

Let’s play Mary mix and match.

Have you been risky in your loves?

Steadfast in your endeavors?

In what have you been particularly risky or steadfast?  Would love be one of them?

For myself I do not know how developing love in life could be anything but risky.  The trick, for me, is to be steadfast and beholden always to love, no matter the pain. 

If you were to be judged by how well you love, how would your fare?

More Evidence - Part 2

2.

Where are you when you’re not thinking?

Frightening, isn’t it?

Where are you when you’re not feeling anything?

Oh, worse!

Except for faith and imagination, nature is that hard fortress you can’t get out of.

Some person are captive to love, other would make the beloved a captive. Which one are you?

As we travel through Guyana, conversations frequently turn to experiencing birds in the wild that in our home countries are kept in cages, often with harm, suffering, and death as a consequence.  There is no doubt that humans love their birds, but in so doing, they make the beloved a captive. What would it look like if instead we were bound by love instead of being the binders?

Perhaps I would not even be here to hear the sound of the White Bell Bird.  I would not be using the earth’s resources to travel so far to behold beauty and to save it.  Instead I would be at home with a simple bell calling me to meditation, to awakening, and to liberation.  I would be swooning with every sunrise that lights the grandeur of the tall pines in the oak hammock.  Yet it is the beloved birds that bind me and bring me to these places in Latin America to be with them, and perhaps contribute if I can.  I am ever captive, and the captor.

We go through our days, with cages around us and the door open. 

We can step out into freedom, or we can lure others in with us.

Which will you do this day?

In the Darkness

At night the stars throw down their postcards of light.

Who are they that love me so much?...

I am grateful and faithful to this other romance

Though we will not ever know each other’s names, we will not ever

Touch.

.

I am reading John Donahue’s book, “Beauty – The Invisible Embrace.”  In the beginning pages he writes that if we can see beauty, we will feel like we belong on this planet and will be welcomed home with open arms.  He writes in prose as Mary does in poetry.

We are touched by beauty. Perhaps not as lovers in the night, or as friends on a walk, or children at bed time, but our soul is in contact with the All at times when wonder, awe, and splendor enter our days.  We are caressed, we are embraced, we are held.

At such times our faith is affirmed and feelings of gratitude emerge. 

How now can we open our eyes to see beauty more consistently, so that justice and peace may grow from our faith and gratitude?

Don't Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate.  Give in to it.  There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are no wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left.  Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches of power in the world. It could be anything, but very like you notice it in the instant when love begins…..

In my younger years I had a period where I was not proud of my behavior.  Though love was behind my actions, the strategies I picked to respond to the love had consequences for others.  A few days ago, after nearly 16 years I spoke with someone that had been negatively (and positively – ain’t that the way of things) impacted by me.  I was surprised to find her voice on the phone. After a few minutes I jumped right into expressing my regrets about my behavior in those days. She told me, “It has been forgotten.” 

Such a rich gift!  Such a joy! Not because I had been forgiven, but because I had a chance to redeem a time when my wisdom was not very apparent by speaking of harm.

Still I wonder, if we give into joy, may harm arise?  Is there any way to minimize the harm, or avoid it?  

Maybe not.

So my plan, dear Mary, is yes perhaps to let joy rule the day when it surprises me, but to communicate this with others and with my deeper wisdom so that we together come up with a plan where kindness and peace have a chance.

When have you give into joy with delight, or regret?

The Sweetness of Dogs (Fifteen)

What do you say Percy?  I am thinking

of sitting out on the sand to watch the moon rise. Full tonight. 

So we go

as the moon rises, so beautiful...

makes me take measure of myself: one iota pondering heaven....

How grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich

it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,

leans against me and gazes up into

my face. As though I were his perfect moon.

I've got physics on the brain, hard not to given that my spouse the preacher has been doing a series on physics and spirituality.  Just this morning we marveled at how we can change the outcome of an event by watching it.  So I think of Percy watching Mary in his sweet way.  Does Mary change?  Does she become more loving, more beautiful, more open to the beauty of herself, dogs, and the moon?  What if I were to open my heart and see everyone today as perfect just the way they are. Would this change their behavior?  Would it change the world?

It might if we all did it.

Shall we?

For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it from the sand.

Let me fumble it into a box, with the lid  open.

Okay, I put the box into my car and started up the highway

to the place where sometimes, sometimes not, such things can be mended.

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I won't call it good or bad, just one way or another.

Then the  gull lurched from the box and onto the back of the front seat and punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

But we all know, don't we how sometimes things have to feel anger, so as not to be defeated?

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world, even in its hard places

So, even if the effort may come to nothing, you have to do something.

It was generally speaking, a perfectly beautiful summer morning.

The gull beat the air with its good wing.

I kept my eyes on the road.

I have put thousands of broken birds into boxes, sometimes they have been mended, often not.

I have always wanted to label this state of bird injury and extinction as bad, my anger sometimes fueling my engagement in the overall broken world, and sometimes not.

There are just too many dying birds out there for anger to suffice.

So I awake this morning determined to love the world, even in its hard places, its impossible places.

What is impossible for you to love?

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?

On the Beach

On the beach, at dawn:

four small stones clearly

hugging each other.

How many kinds of love

might there be in the world,

and how many formations might they make

and who am I ever

 to imagine I could know

such a marvelous business?

When the sun broke

it poured willingly its light

over the stones

that did not move, not at all,

just as, to its always generous term,

it shed its light on me,

my own body that loves

equally to hug another body

As a biologist, and a veterinarian, I have seen amazing variety in how animals express their bonding, gender, and sexuality, and I am learning all the time how this is true too in the human animal.  Just last night I saw a program about transgendered people, and a few years back I married a transgender couple and gave a sermon on the topic at my congregation.  Bodies and minds are such fascinating, awesome conglomerations of physics, physiology, chemistry, and biology, and then the macro-output comes out as one body hungering for the touch and affection of another in apparent infinite possibility, much of it beauty beyond words. I say "much of it" because harm can be mixed in with the body's powerful emotions and desires. So much of our ever present subconscious wiring motivates us, and also evades our understanding resulting in actions that are regretable. I speak of deceit, physical harm, and sexual abuse.

There is risk to responding to the body's intent, however I for one am glad that we live in age where the light of understanding "human" has shed a light on how to nurture healthy relationships. We know that we are capable of great love and remarkable companionship, as well as tragic actions and mournful  decisions.

I pray that today I, and others, will choose love and beauty over tragedy.

What choices are before you this day?

Philip’s Birthday

I gave,

To a friend that I care for deeply,

Something that I loved.

It was only a small

Extremely shapely bone

That come from the ear

Of a whale.

It hurt a little

To give it away.

The next morning

I went out, as usual,

At sunrise

And there, in the harbor,

Was a swan.

I don’t know

What he or she was doing there,

But the beauty of it

Was gift.

Do you see what I mean?

You give, and you are given.

I have always liked the idea of a potlatch – an indigenous custom of North America where a family gives away possessions in celebration and in gratitude. So too I have heard of people who on their own birthdays, give gifts to others.  One day when I came up to a national park entrance the car ahead of me, whose passengers were strangers to me, paid for the entrance. Another time a car ahead of me in a toll both paid for me.  Wow.   What if any time we felt gratitude or some good news came our way, we started looking for multiple possessions we might offer to others?  Or maybe every day we made it a goal to give something away?  What gifts indeed might come to us and our world.

What will you gift today?  Or be gifted with?

I Want to Write Something So Simply

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.

I think that Mary can check this off her list of accomplishments. She does write so simply that it feels as if I am with her as she walks with Percy along the shore or meanders through a meadow marveling at the flowers.  Of course, in her very writing she distinguishes herself from all others. The words themselves, captured permanently in time say "I" and "you."  It is up to the reader then to deconstruct what is written so we can hear "Thou" and "We" instead. After a year's rising with Mary I believe that my neural circuitry as rewired to do this translation work when I pick up a book of her poems, see the road kill, or write her to you in this blog.  We are all love and pain, life and death, and it's all good.

                

What and how can you write simply about today?

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?

Empty Branch in the Orchard

To have loved is everything. I loved, once

A hummingbird who came every afternoon-the freedom loving male-

Who flew by himself to sample the sweets of the garden

To sit on a high, leafless branch with his red throat gleaming.

And then, he came no more. And I’m still waiting for him, ten years later,

To come back, and he will, or he will not.

There is a certain commitment

That each of us is given, that has to do with another world

If there is one.  I remember you, hummingbird. I think of you every day

Even as I am still here, soaked in color, waiting, year after honey-rich year.

What is this other world of which Mary speaks?  Is it heaven? The beloved community?  A science fiction adventure where we discover new planets and species?

I wonder if it this other place isn’t already here, within and without us.  Perhaps it is a commitment to love and hence be bathed in all the colors of the rainbow. We promise to do this even knowing that one day the light will fade from our eyes and we will no longer see the sign of life’s covenant with us. 

After death we either will come back to life, or we will not.

But what if we came back to life this day with the sun’s rising?

What or who will you love today?

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

The story I tell of myself was that I was born a happy child.  I recall feeling such love for my siblings and parents, or at least empathy.  I had a sense of the drudgery of my father and mother. This didn't impact me greatly for I spent as much time as I could with birds, and flew free. Then somewhere in the growing up, I lost the ability for the over view, and returned to the mud and harshness of the terrestrial life. 

The span of these middle adult years had a lot of harsh landings, and a lot of escapist time up in the air.  Alternating between dreams and grounding may have been challenging, as I believe it is for most of us in our middle years, but what skills we acquire! Now is the time to fly low to the ground so we can wrap our wings around the suffering and the gorgeous. 

At what level do you fly today?

The Poet Always Carries a Notebook

What is he scribbling on the page?

Is there snow in it, or fire?

Is it the beginning of a poem?

Is it a love note?

What is the first yawn of the morning?

The gasp while the scale delivers its news?

The sink full of dishes?

The newspaper full of bad advice trumpeted as truth?

The son calling from jail?

The uncertain purpose of the day's activities?

These words seen in blog form?

Are they all love notes?

Spring

Faith is the instructor. 

We need no other.

Guess what I am, he says in his incomparably lovely

Young-man voice.  Because I love the world I think of grass,

I think of leaves and the bold sun, I think of the rushes

In the black marshes just coming back from under the pure white

And now finally melting stubs of snow.

Whatever we know or don’t know

Leads us to say:

Teacher, what do you mean?

But faith is still there, and silent.

Then he who owns the incomparable voice suddenly flows upward

And out of the room and I follow, obedient and happy.

Of course I am thinking the Lord was once young and will never in fact be old.

And who else could this be, who goes off down the green path,

Carrying his sandals, and singing?

What if the grass were to sprout tall one day, and the seeds as they take to the wind, whisper, “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if instead a mighty wave came to shore and then in gentleness, ever so slowly, flowed in streets and alley ways and even right up to your front porch, and just as the wave turned to return to the sea, commanded “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if a bird came a calling to your window, tapping until you finally opened your life onto the world, and in a voice sweetly luring, sang, “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if a fierce eyed man you usually spy on one street corner or another emerges from the woods, and then walks past you (as you leisurely dine in a local restaurant) on his way to the bus terminal, alternating whistling with a face that pleads, “follow me.”

Would you spring up and step outside, spread your arms, and shout with tears to the bold sun and the sons and daughters of hominids, “Yes!  I will take your hand, wing, surge, and wind filled promises and follow you.”

What if we did this today?