The Kitten

More amazed than anything 
I took the perfectly black 
stillborn kitten 
with the one large eye 
in the center of its small forehead 
from the house cat's bed 
and buried it in a field 
behind the house. 

I suppose I could have given it 
to a museum, 
I could have called the local 
newspaper. 

But instead I took it out into the field 
and opened the earth 
and put it back 
saying, it was real, 
saying, life is infinitely inventive, 
saying, what other amazements 
lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes, 

I think I did right to go out alone 
and give it back peacefully, and cover the place 
with the reckless blossoms of weeds.

I just read a critique of Mary Oliver's poems where the author concluded that Mary is giving up too much information to the reader.   "...She takes her poems too far by giving the reader the answer to a puzzle and not letting them try for themselves.  Poetry is meant to make the reader think, wondering what the author was talking about or what they meant.  Instead, she leads the reader through explanation within her work, or flatly states a meaning.  By doing so, her poems read as though she’s talking, taking the musicality out of them."

Well, I've been on Mary myself over this near year of rising with her. Sometimes I fuss that she gives not enough of an answer, and at other times I am relieved that I hear her wisdom, her actions, and her account of her actions.  I spend enough time alone in my thoughts every day. What a pleasure to hear what someone else is doing out in the fields that are beyond "wrongdoing and rightdoing" as Rumi pens.  In some ways, her poems are stories and not poems. This is more evident in her books where the selections move in and out of prose.

I admit too to at times disagreeing with her conclusion, her thoughts, her bearings.  But what am I disagreeing with? Am I saying she is wrong to conclude this way or that, and to pass on to those readers what is right and good for her?  Or am I saying that I mourn that she is separate from me and has her own way about her?  She's got 20 years on me, is from New England, and is a very different creature than me.  Is this what I wish to argue with as I raise my fist to the sun's first rays on the mornings when Mary disturb me?  I think not.  My beef (and belief) is this, "I am not alone in this world, and refuse to carry on as if it were so."  

Mary's poems, with a conclusion or not, and whether they feel right or wrong to me, challenge me to use all that I have to see our interdependence, and to have faith that so much love and compassion is still to be born.




What is still to be born in you?

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.

The Beautiful, Stripped Sparrow

in the afternoons,
in the almost empty fields,
i hum the hymns
i used to sing

in church.
they could not tame me,
so they would not keep me,
alas,

and how that feels,
the weight of it,
i will not tell
any of you,

not ever.
still, as they promised,
God, once he is in your heart,
is everywhere -

so even here
among the weeds
and the brisk trees.
how long does it take

to hum a hymn? strolling
one or two acres
of the sweetness
of the world,

not counting
a lapse, now and again,
of sheer emptiness.
once a deer

stood quietly at my side.
and sometimes the wind
has touched my cheek
like a spirit.

am i lonely?
the beautiful, striped sparrow,
serenely, on the tallest weed in his kingdom,
also sings without words.

I do not know how to properly analyze another's poem or another's heart. It doesn't seem the proper thing to do. So let me be improper. In this poem I do wonder if Mary regrets her years away from the church. Perhaps instead it is the years away from God, though I could have sworn she saw God everywhere in bird, tree, and flower. Maybe the difference was that her heart had not broken enough to let even more love and light in. Now it has. So she moves beyond words and poem. Her old ways of thinking don't capture the reality of the love, the entirety of it, and the humility of it. I too have walked in those lonely fields, singing "How Great Thou Art" feeling God as well as sparrow and tall grass.

Who or what comes to you in your loneliness?

Great Moth Comes From His Papery Cage - September 12, 2010

Gone is the worm, that tunnel body. Gone is the mouth

That loved leaves and tomatoes.

Gone are the innumerable feet.

He is beautiful now, and shivers into the air

As if he has always know how,

Who crawled and crawled, all summer,.

He has wide wings, with a flare at the bottom.

The moon excites him. The heat of the night excites him.

But, where did the dance come from?

Surely not out of a simple winter’s sleep.

Surely it’s more than ambition, this new architecture?

What could it be, that does it?

Let me look closer, and a long time, the next time

I see green-blooded worm crawling and curling

Hot day after hot day

Among the leaves and the smooth, proud tomatoes.

We have had a long, hot summer; record breaking in fact. That relentless heat, for which there seems no purpose, has been accompanied with a profusion of garden spiders around our home. Throughout the summer they have grown enormous. I mark my days by observing their webs, each time grown slightly larger in proportion to their bodies, and wonder how it is they “know” to build their webs. Where did this knowledge come from? I also wonder where will the spiders go to when fall finally breaks the wall of heat and humidity? Maybe the from and to location is the same. Spiders and knowledge, moths and tomatoes, humans and mice – in the watching and listening the source and our future unite and we can but dance in wonder.

Where does life come from and where are we going? Our breath unites us, no matter if we know the answer of source and future.

Meanwhile

Lord, my body is not yet a temple,

But only one of your fair fields.

An empty field that nobody wants, at least not yet.

But even here the lily is somewhere,

Sometimes it lifts its head above the grasses,

The daises, the milkweed, the mallow.

And sometimes, like us, it sleeps, or at least

Leans below the blades of the grasses.

Lord, I live as you have made me to live.

I bite hungrily into the peach and the turnip.

I bite, with sorrow, into the calf and the lamb.

I drink the tears of the clouds.

I praise the leaves of the shrub oaks

And the pine trees in their bold coats.

I listen and give thanks to the catbird and the thrush.

Meanwhile, the fox knows where you are.

The bees leave the swamp azalea and fly straight

To the shadow of your face.

Meanwhile my body is rustic and brash.

The world I live in is hedges, and small blossoms.

Lord, consider me, and my earnest work.

A hut I have made, out of the grasses.

Now I build the door, out of all things brash and rustic.

Day and night it is open.

Have you seen it yet, among the grasses?

How it longs for you?

How it tries to shine, like gold?

The very first sermon I ever preached in a Unitarian Universalist church was based on the Christian reading “Consider the Lilies.” In Luke 12: Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!

Mary’s words speak of her doubts, her questioning faith, or perhaps your doubts and mine? Is it possible to work hard enough that we might be accepted, or better said, that we accept that we are not separate from the glorious whole? We are as noble as the lilies, the grasses, the ravens. Perhaps it is not a matter of work, but faith to live as best we can and know underneath our daily paths, or perhaps to the side, is a field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. What are we waiting for? Let’s go lie down in the grass and let the fire of love consume us.

White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

I wonder what it is that I will accomplish today

If anything can be called that marvelous word.

It won’t be

My kind of work, which is only putting words on a page,

The pencil

Haltingly calling up

The light of the world,

Yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright

As the mockingbird’s verbal hilarity

In the still unleafed shrub in the churchyard-

Or the white heron rising over the swamp and the darkness,

His yellow eyes and broad wings wearing

The light of the world in the light of the world-

Ah yes, I see him.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Okay, I’m flat out disagreeing with Mary, although given the paradoxical nature of poems; she probably secretly led me into agreeing with her. I do believe that the poem on the paper is the light of the world as is the poet. The heron over the swamp is no more beautiful than the humans I saw in the hydrotherapy pool this morning. I’m at a resort/convention hotel in San Diego and after working out I limped over to the Jacuzzi to lessen the ache of my knee. In one corner of the Jacuzzi is a middle aged woman, her body bulging out of her suit. In another corner is an older man, he too rotund and big bandage covering a third of his face. I can go into judgment mind and ask what is right about we well-fed middle aged people relaxing in the middle of the day in an expensive hotel while billions upon billions of other beings are suffering? How is the work we putter with considered any kind of accomplishment amidst the beauty and tragedy that rises out of the ache of our hearts and the bodies of so many? I don’t rightly know how to answer this except to say that my inner knowing replies to the doubting mind that beauty is in all bodies and all words. And that means mine too.

What is it you hope to accomplish today, and is it enough?

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?

The Bleeding Heart

I know a bleeding-heart plant that has thrived for sixty years if not more, and has never missed a spring without rising and spreading itself into a glossy bush, with many small red hearts dangling. Don't you think that deserves a little thought? The woman who planted it has been gone for a long time, and everyone who saw it in that time has also died or moved away and so, like so many stories, this one can't get finished properly. Most things that are important, have you noticed, lack a certain neatness. More delicious, anyway, is to remember my grandmother's pleasure when the dissolve of winter was over and the green knobs appeared and began to rise, and to create their many hearts. One would say she was a simple woman, made happy by simple things. I think this was true. And more than once, in my long life, I have wished to be her.

Once upon a time there were a humanoid people whose heart's cycled with the seasons. In the winter, their hearts shrunk to the size of a raison. The cold snows echoed their cool souls and empty faces. Come the spring their hearts began to grow and by summer would be so big that you could see them beating through their skin, emitting a pink glow around their chests. All summer long they would forget their work and their worries, and spend their days laughing in the rivers and ponds, embraced by life, love, and one another. Their favorite past time was to press their chests against one another and see how long their hearts could beat in perfect synchronization. Come fall they held on to each other's hands as if it was the last time ever. And of course it would be, at least until the following spring. Why do I wish I were they?

How does your heart wax and wane?

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain.
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear--but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

Yesterday I was touched by water that had been buried in the ground a hundred years, or longer. Our day off, we went west to the springs area and snorkeled in Manatee, Fanning, and Otter Springs. It is so refreshing to look down into depths of the Springs where light barely reaches, and feel the ancient water rush up past me, washing my concerns from me. These moments of being held in the springs is happiness and we lingered the whole day there. Though the experience is not all pleasant. The springs are dying. Many of them are choked with abnormal algae growth from nitrogen pollution and the flow levels are down, both of which negatively impact the beings that live in and around them, myself included. So when it rains here and I see the puddles disappear into the lawn, scratchy, sparse, and brown from no watering and no fertilizers, I offer a prayer as it journeys down, “When you emerge may we use you wisely so that many beings may be touched in health and love.”

Do you know where rain water goes in your area? Is it’s journey bring happiness or concern to you?

Mindful

Every day

I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

How does Mary write one poem after another like this? Her daily presentations are causing a shift in me. If you’ve been reading along with me, I wonder if the same is true for you? Every day for the last 196 days I awake to Mary, reflect, and write here. She is helping me become more wise in several important areas. I sense a greater acceptance of reality just as it is – including suffering, death, and human fumbling and bumbling. Her poems speak of the constant beauty in the hard to accept, and so I see this more clearly now. I dare to presume that there may be a twinge more mindfulness in my day as well. The drab and the daily have astounding stories to tell. Take our common House Sparrow here in the U.S.A. If they could talk, what would they say? What prayers do they offer to the world in their seemingly mundane daily occurrence? Would they tell us how they are endangered in their home territory of Europe and how their cousin, the Tree Sparrow of Europe and Asia, were killed by the millions upon millions in 1958 in China. Mao Zedong commanded the people to kill this bird so there would be grain for export. They did as they were instructed and in turn, the absence of this bird led to the over population of locusts, which led to the worst famine in history, killing some 30 million Chinese in the following year. So thank you dear Mary for helping me see the lives of sparrows, grass, and family members as grateful prayers.

What might the drab and mundane say to you?

Moss

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn’t a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older-a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else – standing up!-that hadn’t yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course .But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

Sweet cousin.

Key words: family, wild, insect, season, fear, stone, animal, plant, world, evolution

In our congregation we often say that we are a community of memory and hope. We lift up values, stories, and science to remind us of what we already know – the deeper wisdom underneath the quotidian events of our lives. What is that wisdom? It seems that deep within our psyche is the knowing that we are all family. And let be me frank here. We have the just as deep knowing that we’d like to be done with this family – a family that brings pain, suffering, war, disease, broken relationships, and death. So we leave the trees for the savannah, stand up, run, chase, fly, and enter in space. One day I imagine we will leave this planet, some remembering in the millennia to come that it was round, a circle of life unbroken with connections, and others thinking it was flat, empty of depth and full of death and misery. The moss sees level beauty, and we humans can see into multidimensional universes. God of glory, god of wisdom, may we never forget either!

How do you see the world?

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?

West Wind

1

If there is life after earth-life will come with me? Even then? Since we're bound to be something, why not together? Imagine!...

2

You are young. So you know everything... But, listen to me... Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied...

3

And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up?...

7

And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud? Flowers in every field, in every garden, with their soft beaks and their pastel shoulders? ...In one room after another, the lovers meet, quarrel, sicken, break apart, cry out. One or two leap from windows. Most simply lean, exhausted, their thin arms on the sill. they have done all that they could. The golden eagle, that lives not far from here, has perhaps a thousand tiny feathers flowing from the back of its head, each one shaped like an infinitely small but perfect spear.

Mary speaks to her lover here perhaps after some disappointing scuffle, asking her/him to consider that love is not just a flower, but a spear of beauty. Love is not for us to put into a box but is the god of the open waters that is merciless to the rowboat of our lives. Perhaps as humans there is no way we cannot give up on love simply because we tire of the constant struggle, of the constant rows and fights we have with those with whom we have found disappointment in love. I mourn the number of times I have considered that love should be a garden, when I see litter cluttering up a relationship. And so I tire of picking up the trash, and my love drifts away. We humans fight like lice upon a bird - the lice of the left wing say my way is correct, and the lice of the right wing say no my way is correct. In the meantime, the eagle soars on. Perhaps I'll do some gliding today, tomorrow, and all the days to come so that I may rest with an open heart, ready not for a row, but to row.

Is there anything that is not a paradox?

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

Every summer

I listen and look

Under the sun’s brass and even

In the moonlight, but I can’t hear

Anything, I can’t see anything-

Not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,

Not the leaves…

And still

Every day,

The leafy fields

Grow taller and thicker-

Green gowns lofting up in the night,

Showered with silk.

And so, every summer

I fail as a witness, seeing nothing-

I am deaf too

To the tick of leaves,

The tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet-

All of it

Happening

Beyond all seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.

Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.

Let the wind turn in the trees,

And the mystery hidden in dirt

Swing through the air.

How could I look at anything in this world

And tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?

What should I fear?

One morning

In the leafy green ocean

The honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body

Is sure to be there.

Faith: Listening even when we can’t hear anything, can’t see anything, can’t feel anything.

Faith: What moves through us in beauty, even when we are afraid.

Faith: That the sun will rise, as will summer’s corn.

What is faith to you?