More Evidence - Part 3

3.

It is salvation if one can step forth from the clutter of one’s mind into that open space-that almost holy space-called work.

Emerson: how the elegance of his language can make me weep over my own inadequacy…

Do you hear the rustle and outcry on the page?

Do you hear it’s longing?...

4. 

Let laugher come to you now and again, that sturdy friend.

The impulse to leap off the cliff, when the body falsely imagines it might fly, may be restrained by reason, also by modesty.  Of the two possibilities, take your choice, and live.

Refuse all cooperation with the heart’s death.

5.

 Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be musical inside yourself.

Yesterday I visited Kaieteur Falls in central Guyana.  Here is the tallest single drop falls in the world.  While there we saw a pair of Red and Green Macaws circle through the rising mist of the falls, their calls echoing down the canyons and down deep in our souls.   


At the head of the falls are immense cliffs, to which we were invited to crawl onto our stomachs and peer over.  In between dizzy spells, I watched the White-collared Swifts approach the falls and then in twos and threes dive straight down the vertical wall of water,  twittering amongst themselves as they left us behind on the cliffs.  I would not be exaggerating to say that we experienced an impulse to follow them, and perhaps we did.  Somehow watching them and the macaws it was as if we ourselves were flying as they, the rainbow rulers and aerobatic champions of the falls.

Let us choose not to be restrained by either modesty or reason, but jump over the edge of perceived separateness so that we may put to death our egos so our hearts may yet live and our spirits at last soar.

What might you choose to day so that your heart may live and your spirit soar?

Four Sonnets - Part 3

3.

The authors of history are among us still.

And believe me they believe what they believe

As sincerely as the millions who are simply looking for a life, a purpose.

Who are the good people? We are all good people

Except when we are not.  Meanwhile the forests are felled..

Who despises us and for what reason? Whom do we

Despise and for what reason?....

“What’s on your mind” we say to each other.

As though it’s some kind of weight.

.

I’m in a forest that we speak of in the day as being in danger of felling. As night falls it is too close to nightmares to bring into conscious thought.  If we do, our enemies might stalk us in the dark and keep our dreams of a beloved community from forming.  It’s hard to say who the enemy is – the oil companies that will come in to drill, and build roads and communities around them?  The government in Georgetown, Guyana that sold the mining rights out from underneath the Amerinians?  Or we consumers with our electricity eating gadgets and cars? 

This despising is a weight – I see it in the conservationists around me and I feel it in my heart.  If I could have the yellow breast of the macaw, perhaps I would be too delighted with myself and my kind to look at anything or anyone but in awe.

Whom do you despise and why?

Lark Ascending - Back from Guyana

I am now back from Guyana, and this my first morning, spent some time looking at the pictures that do no real justice to the beauty there.  Two in particular are my favorites - Kaieteur Falls and a pair of Red and Green Macaws flying in front of the falls.  They are rising in the cloudy mists of the thunderous water.  As so frequently, such a coincidence that Mary's poem is of birds rising to the clouds. So I include those pictures here for you.  The rest of the poems that will finish out this 15.5 months of Mary's poems, were all written while in Guyana.

Lark Ascending

galloped up into the  morning air

then floated

a long way

whispering, I imagine,

to the same mystery

I try to speak to

down here. ...

if I could

carry a message of thanks

to the doors of the clouds.

I don't know whether it would be

of the or the mind. I know

it's the poem I have yet to make

There are so many ways to give thanks - poets do so with their words, birds perhaps in their own way with their songs, and children with their giggling runs.  Writing, singing, laughing - these are but just three ways to live the day in gratitude.  I imagine there are thousands of ways.  Here are some of mine:

Looking up at the stars and smiling

Bowing to the trees

Kissing the ground

Hugging a person

Identifying a bird species

Biking instead of driving the car

Writing this blog

What are some of your ways of giving thanks?

April

I wanted to speak at length about

The happiness of my body and the

Delight of my mind for it was

April, a night, a full moon and-

But something in myself for maybe

From somewhere other said: not too

Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

I am at the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach giving a workshop of Nonviolent Communication. In my presentation I encourage people to use as few words as possible to keep the chance for connection and understanding alive.  Perhaps our brains do best in about 40 word segments.  Mary’s poem today is 51 words, just about right. 

It doesn’t take many words really to say, “Look, there goes beauty.”  “Hey, beauty is dwindling.”  “My heart hurts.”  “Now let’s do something about it.” 

What will you do “about it” – sing?  Change?  Open yourself to death and suffering?

First Days in San Miguel de Allende

1.

The flagellated Christ

is being carried

to San Miguel de Allende.

He must be very heavy

yet the carriers persist

upon the sun flashed road

and the people follow

in the same way that people would seek

a river heard of but never yet found.

they are that thirsty...

2.

I have come, for the first time, to Mexico.

And what has happened

to that intense ambition

with which I always wake?

Soaked up

in the colors, stolen

by the blood Christs.

I am feeling something, incredibly,

like peace...

3.

the tops of the northbound trains are dangerous.

Still, they are heaped with hopefuls.

I understand their necessity.

Understanding, however, it not sharing.

Oh, let there be a wedding of the

mind and the heart, if not today

then soon.

Meanwhile, let me change my own life

into something better.

Meanwhile, on the streets of San Miguel de Allende

it is easy to smile.

"Hola," I say to the children.

"Hi," they say, as I pass

with my passport, and money, in my pocket.

For many years I lived with the shame of being able to come and go from Mesoamerica, while I left my friends behind. They suffered violence, poverty, illness, brokenness, alcoholism, and dying children.  I could leave and they could not.  Now some of them are dead.

It is for that reason, in part, that we took into our homes two young men from Honduras who came up through Mexico on top of one of the trains that Mary speaks of - the Death Train.

Yes I know that all of life is journey towards death!  Yes I know that I can't save every child, bird, and tree!  Yes I know that there are pretty flowers to view along the dangerous path!

I know much and can learn more.

But for today, let there be a wedding of my heart and head.

May I vow with every breath, "I do!"

What is your vow today?

There Are a Lot of Mockingbirds in this Book

Yes, there are many

of those wondrous creatures

who live in the thorns

and are musical all day...

but this isn't nature

in which such birds

want, each pair,

their own few acres-

this isn't nature

where the sweetest things,

being hidden in leaves

and thorn-thick bushes

reveal themselves rarely-

this is a book

of the heart's rapture,

of hearing and praising

and  never forgetting

so that the world

is what the world is

in a long lifetime:

singer after singer

bursts from the thorn bush,

now, and again, and again,

their songs in the mind forever.

  

Isn't that what each are - singers in thorn bushes?  Somehow, during the course of the day we manage to reveal our true, wondrous selves and this song builds the world as it is.

Which is a world where no acres belong to anyone

Where beauty and love are ever revealed

Where the day is full of hearing songs of wonder

And our responding praise   -

pulling thorns from those have burst forth

or have yet to escape.

What thorns might you remove 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.

Introduction to Thirst and Messenger

Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Did Mary mean to segue between books ending one with igniting and the other beginning with flame? How did she know that my blog from the day before would speak of being astonished into stillness? Mary, she's in my head and heart. She predicts my life. I have found a faithful companion that speaks of my life's true work - to love, and to speak love. Of course, if it is that basic, how could she not be with me always, as well as the clam and the wren? One quiet, one chattering, both me. All beloved.

What is your life's work?