Trying to Be Thoughtful in the First Brights of Dawn

I am thinking, or trying to think, about all the

Imponderables for which we have

No answers, yet endless interest all the

Range of our lives, and it’s

Good for the head not doubt to undertake such

Meditations….

Excuse me now, please; it’s morning, heavenly bright,

And my irrepressible heart begs me to hurry on

Into the next exquisite moment.

I am trying to be thoughtful here too this morning, this afternoon, this dusk. But what would happen if I, or if you, were to simply let go of the lists, the thoughts, the judgments, the work to get things done.  What is the worse that could happen?

The work would stop and the forests would come back? The fish would jump once again in the ocean?  The children would croon with delight of so many grandparents.

I have no idea if my focus in this life is of any merit compared to the pair of Scarlet Macaws that flew below me this morning.

So I guess that perhaps there is nothing but the heart to follow in the moment – and God help us have the courage to travel the path where this leads us.

What exquisite moments do you hope to encounter today?

How Many Days

How many days I lived and had never used

the holy words.

Tenderly I began them when it came to me

to want to, oh mystery irrefutable!

Then I went out of that place

and into a field and lay down

among the weeds and the grasses,

whispering to them, fast, in order to keep

that world also.

I have been on leave from my home congregation as I shift from parish ministry to my community multispecies ministry.  I don't know how many days exactly it has been since I was part of the Sunday morning ritual, but it will have been nearly a year by the time I return.  Yet I wonder if I have ever left.

Aren't we in this blog exchanging holy words?

And what about the red-winged blackbirds by the sinkhole  who squealed at me yesterday so that I wouldn't miss their fine red epaulets? 

And the red-shouldered hawks who coupled on the telephone pole during last week's morning walk?  He flew off, I hope satisfied. She remained, all fluffed and still, unashamedly content.

Their world is our world.  May we treat it holy, to keep it whole.

How do you keep the world whole? Yourself whole?

Mysteries, Yes - February 14, 2011

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of lambs...

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Ah, my spiritual practice for the day...

Look

Laugh

Lower my self

What will you practice today so that you may live the questions?

Summer Morning

Heart, I implore you,

it's time to come back from the dark,

it's morning, the hill are pink

and the roses whatever they felt

in the valley of night

are opening now

their soft dresses, their leaves

are shining. Why are you laggard?

Sure you have seen this a thousand times,

which isn't half enough. Let the world

have its way with you, luminous as it is

with mystery and pain-

graced as it is with the ordinary.

It is quite dark now. Election day has passed and soon I'll pick up the paper and wonder if we can ever have the kind of discourse that will bring peace and flourishing to our communities of mixed species. Compounding this I am reading a novel about the Columbine High School shootings. I wonder how we can move from blame and darkness when there is so much pain? My prayer in the graying dawn is for my heart to not give up and to stay engaged instead of painting the world with a brush laden with opaque and dull thoughts. I know of no way to guarantee the course of the heart in a day - except to give into the day where there will always be shadows and always be something illuminated, with a smile shining through it.

How has the ordinary graced your life?

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.

What the Body Says - August 30, 2010

I was born here, and

I belong here, and

I will never leave.

The blue heron's

gray smoke will flow over me

for years

and the wind will decide

all directions

until I am safely and entirely

something else.

I am thinking this

this winter morning...

of transformation

Of course

I wonder about

the mystery

that is surely up there

in starry space

and how some part of me

will go there at last.

But I am talking now

of the way the body speaks,

and the wind, that keeps saying,

firmly, lovingly:

a little while and then this body

will be stone; then

it will be water; then

it will be air.

I am thinking about yesterday morning when I was swimming in the Ichetucknee river. While in that cold water that carried me and my burdens, I transformed. For the nearly two hours of snorkeling and flowing with all we saw, I knew that I belonged as surely as did the blue heron preening amidst the storks on the river side. This was not a cognitive knowing, for there is no thinking other than marvel and wonder as we swam down river. The body, though, merges into one just as this river will merge into one via the Sante Fe, Suwanne, Gulf, and Atlantic Ocean. With turtles and Ibis at nose level only a few feet away I become bird and reptile. Floating under a cypress tree where an Osprey has just taken an unlucky perch, I become fish. Eyes nearly as wide open as the family of otters snacking on river bottom mussels, I am bivalve and mammal.

Upon exiting the river, reluctantly, I shiver for nearly an hour as my core temperature returns to normal, especially difficult as a wind has come up. This wind wings a message out from my heart of love and gratitude that at least for a short while yesterday I knew no separate self.

Where do you experience flow in your life?

Mountain Lion on East Hill Road, Austerlitz, NY

Once, years ago, I saw

the mountain cat. She stepped

from under a cloud

of birch trees and padded

along the edge of the field. When she saw

that I saw her, instantly

flames leaped

in her eyes, it was that

distasteful to her to be

seen. Her wide face

was a plate of gold,

her black lip

curled as though she had come

to a terrible place in the long movie, her shoulders

shook like water, her tail

swung at the grass

as she turned back under the trees,

just leaving me time to guess

that she was not a cat at all

but a lean and perfect mystery.

that perhaps I didn't really see,

but simply understood belong here

like all other perfections

that still, occasionally, emerge

out of the last waterfalls, forests,

the last unviolated mountains, hurrying

day after day, year after year

through the cage of the world.

Once a wild cat stepped out of a cloud of mist and saw me. I was in Tikal, Guatemala - a magical place of Mayan ruins suggesting unheard of possibilities. It was early morning and as I walked along an ancient promenade between temples, an ocelot stepped upon the same path facing me. Such mystery, such beauty, and such a brief moment of a gift I instantly appreciated. Then the unexpected happened. The cat started walking towards me, closer and closer. I grew alarmed - perhaps the cat was sick, or had rabies because this was certainly atypical behavior. I also held onto the hope that somehow I had been chosen by the wild world as one fit to be in relationship with non human animals, that I was not a cager, but a liberator. I could be trusted. While thinking this the ocelot came to within touching distance and I squatted to put our eyes on the same level. She stared at me, and then jumped into my lap! She purred, rubbed her head on my hand, and every time she stole glimpses in my eyes my heart leaped. Ever the wildlife rescuer, I walked around the ruins with her in my arms until she grew tired of this, and then she followed us for a while, and then she disappeared. Later that morning I discovered that she was frequently seen being friendly to tourists, for she had been raised as a kitten by humans, her mother killed. She was now free to roam the forests, and still she choose to interact with her possible cages. I know, I know. She was probably still able to obtain food more easily than hunting and that is what kept her close to us. But what if, we are as wild as her, and as free as her, and there are no such things as cages, human made or otherwise. We, like her, have a choice to be free and in so doing, liberate others.

Where do you feel caged, or cage others?

Mysteries, Four of the Simple Ones

How does the seed-grain feel

When it is just beginning to be wheat?

And how does the catbird feel

When the blue eggs break and become little catbirds?

Maybe on midsummer night’s eve,

And without fanfare?

And how does the turtle feel as she covers her eggs

With the sweep of her feet

Then leaves them for the world to take care of?

Does she know her accomplishment?

And when the blue heron, beaking his long breast feathers,

Sees one feather fall, does he know I will find it?

Will he see me holding it in my hand

As he opens his wings

Softly and without a sound-

As he rises and floats over the water?

And this is just any day at the edge of the pond,

A black and leafy pond without a name

Until I named it.

And what else can we do when the mysteries present themselves

But hope to pluck from the basket the brisk words

That will applaud them,

The heron, the turtle, the catbird, the seed-grain

Kneeling in the dark earth, its body

Opening into the golden world?

Mary has gotten into me. Does she know her accomplishment? Yesterday I spent all day in a conference center, and when evening came a group of us went along the San Diego bay front in search of our restaurant. As we walked I looked over the heads of the crowds onto the water, jammed with boats, and longed for my north Florida springs where I might be held in oneness and peace for a while. Homesickness I suppose, or spring sickness, or for Mary, pond sickness – I wanted to be home. Then this morning, oh so very early by Pacific Coast time, the sun a long way from showing me a golden world, I lay in my bed thinking of the springs and home. And of course I was there – the hotel air swirling around me held me in oneness and peace for a while. The litter dropped on last night’s sidewalk by a street vendor not so very different from the heron’s gifted feather. Reading Mary’s poems it seems that I open more to this world, my only accomplishment this day to kneel in the earth, or on the sidewalk, or the hotel fitness floor, and give word form to the mystery of grateful praise happening in me with you, reader and companion.

How do you name the mysteries in your life, both the grand and the nearly imperceptible?

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?

The Fish - March 8, 2010

The first fish

I ever caught

would not lie down

quiet in the pail

but flailed and sucked

at the burning

amazement of the air

and died

in the slow pouring off

of rainbows...

...and ate him. Now the sea

is in me: I am the fish, the fish

glitters in me..certain to fall

back to the sea. Out of pain,

and pain, and more pain

we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished

by the mystery.

In wonder this morning I marvel how Mary catches my heart when it comes to fish. These days I prefer to snorkel to gaze at a fish's rainbow. This image captures Mary's poem yesterday, "White Night" where she merges with life through floating in water, not hunting in water. In the past, the way I knew to see the rainbow covenant born in fish flesh, was to hunt them with pole and line. And to eat them. The desire to have the sea flow in me in form that my brain gets, that is to eat fish, has not lessened over the years of my vegetarian path. By opting to not eat fish, I have not achieved the lessening of pain, for the mystery and pain of the cycle of life still pries open my heart whether I partake or not. The mystery fills my heart with awe, anew, in reading this poem and images of fish glitter in my mind.

What comes to your mind and heart when you consider that you live through harm to other beings?