The Poet is Told to Fill Up More Pages

But, where are the words?

Not in my pocket….

So I sit, harassed, with my notebook….

Nothing happens.

So this is all I can give you,

Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

Make of it what you will.

I have been writing this blog now for 15.5 months and I have only one more page upon which to reflect.  At least this day, I sit a bit frustrated as to what to write. The words before have always come easy, a gift to reflect with Mary and with you on the beauty of this world and the human spirit. Perhaps it is because I am on a 5.5 hour flight from Guyana to JFK airport.  The ride is bumpy, and I don’t mean the plane – I mean our lives struggling to live always in love with beauty.  How many times can I write this same thing over and over...

                We are all interconnected in beauty, and let our response be love..

I guess I will write this as long as I must.

So make of this blog what you will, and all the words yet to come. In me, and in you.

Do you ever experience “writers block?”  “Parent block?” “working block?”  “loving block?

The Living Together

The spirit says:

What gorgeous clouds.

The body says: Good,

The crops need rain.

The spirit says:

Look at the lambs frolicking.

The body says:

When’s the feast?...

The spirit says:  Body,

How can we live together?

The body says:  Bricks and mortar

And a back door.

In Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, we see that the fundamental needs of protection, security and nuturturance are below the higher needs of spiritual development. If the people are not fed and safe, it is hard for them to ponder the beauty of the clouds and the inherent worth and dignity of others.  Notice I say hard, not impossible. 

It is a difficult task though to embody spirit in our daily lives. Aren’t we always in some ways, or at least perceiving so, under threat or at risk of not having enough?  So we look to the lambs to slaughter them, our relationships, our communities, and our earth.

May we look to this day, and not sneak out the back door to meet our desires and our fears, but go boldly through the front door, and leave the door to our hearts open as we journey forward together.

Do you have tension between your body and spirit?  What is spirit?

Today

Today is a day of

dark clouds and slow rain.

The little blades of corn

are so happy

Today is a day of darkened homes amongst the  terrorized citizenry, 

slowing revolutions, and assassinations of the brave.

Dare we be happy in such a world?

Just Rain

The clouds did not say soon,

but who can tell for sure, it wasn't

the first time I had been fooled;

the sky-doors opened and the rain began

to fall upon all of us...

and then the birds joined in

and I too felt called toward such throat praise. Well,

the whole afternoon went on that way

 until I thought I could feel the almost born things

in the earth rejoicing. As for myself, I just kept walking, thinking: 

once more I am grateful to be present.

How many times today will I say, "just?"

When I see the sun's light move the owl in the leaves into focus -

ah, it's just the early morning light that is a prayer

When my son awakes and trudges towards the coffee machine-

ah, it's just a young man, miracle of birth and circumstance,

and ah, yes, just love

When my spouse sings hymns in the shower,

ah, it's just a man who loves so much that he'll give his life just for me, and ah, yes, just for you too

When I write these words,

ah, they're just me aching to be present

Just for today

just for the next moment

Is there anything you take for granted for which you would like to sing praise for today?

Moles

Under the leaves, under

the first loose

levels of earth

they're there -- quick

as beetles, blind

as bats, shy

as hares but seen

less than these --

traveling

among the pale girders

of appleroot,

rockshelf, nests

of insects and black

pastures of bulbs

peppery and packed full

of the sweetest food:

spring flowers.

Field after field

you can see the traceries

of their long

lonely walks, then

the rains blur

even this frail hint of them --

so excitable,

so plush,

so willing to continue

generation after generation

accomplishing nothing

but their brief physical lives

as they live and die,

pushing and shoving

with their stubborn muzzles against

the whole earth,

finding it

delicious.

Last week I saw a gopher, this illusive creature. She had died, and was on the sandy road leading to our home. I do not know if she had been run over by a car before or after her death. I picked her up and marveled at her being - she was made to live underground and to thrive there.  She seemed so different from me as I lay her under the leaves covering the roots of a roadside tree.

Is she really so different?  Are we here to do anything more than live and die, and to sing that song on days of joy and of despair, ultimately finding it all delicious?

How do you stubbornly exist?

Not This, Not That

Not anything,

Not the eastern wind whose other name

Is rain,

Nor the burning heats of the dunes

At the crown of summer,

Nor the ticks, that new, ferocious populace,

Not the President who loves blood,

Nor the governmental agencies that love money,

Will alter

My love for you, my friends and my beloved,

Or for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman,

Or for you, oh blue sky of a summer morning,

That makes me roll in a barrel of gratitude

Down hills,

Or for you, oldest of friends: hope

Or for you, newest of friends: faith;

Or for you, silliest and dearest of surprises, my

Own life.

I see a turning outwards of Mary in this later run of poems.  She speaks of power, politics, environmental and species lost and suffering, and what we humans might do in response.  Today she tells me that though the world seems to suck the life from us as ticks in the summer, we still have the ability to love, to be grateful, and to have hope, faith, and perspective on the insignificance of our own lives.

Okay, let’s see if this list of responses is at all possible.   Last night I led a count of Yellow-naped Amazons at a roost site in the south coast of Guatemala.  Fifteen years ago there were during this time of year about 250 parrots that spent the night there.  Last night we counted only 8.  Decades of poaching chicks from the nests and habitat loss have taken their toll.  Though  the birds are becoming as flying ghosts over the desert of sugar cane crops, I love them still.  Gratitude is a bit harder to touch this morning, yet, I am glad that I can still know love,  In that love I have hope that the beauty of birds and our world will win out, perhaps ending in extinction, yet, also giving rise to something newly created that will give birth a  different beauty.  I don’t have faith that we will save this land, but I pray and meditate so that I may grow my faith that I am not separate from any being. 

May that faith help me see my  own life with humor, curiosity, and precious acceptance – which fills me with gratitude.  The circus of my own life brings me full circle.

I end with a poem that my spouse sent to me that captures the gratitude in the midst of so much loss.

Thanks - W.S. Merwin

 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

smiling by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

What helps you have perspective in your life, and gratitude?

Sometimes

1.

Something came up

out of the dark.

It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.

It wasn't an animal

or a flower,

unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,

a head the size of a cat

but muddy and without ears.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime

melancholy leaves me breathless...

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!

Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.

The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in  my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again-

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably-

some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Step One: Question

What is it that comes out of the dark?

Is it God?

Is it death?

What is the necessary arrangement between the two?

Step Two: Answer

Love

Step Three: Action

Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Listen

Be crazy

Laugh

Grow

Step Four:  Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary

I summarized Mary's poem with these 4 steps. How would you? What are your "4 steps" to life?

 

The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts - September 9, 2010

For a long time

I was not even

In this world, yet

Every summer

Every rose

Opened in perfect sweetness

And lived

In gracious repose,

In its own exotic fragrance,

In its huge willingness to give

Something, from its small self,

To the entirely of the world.

I think of them, thousands upon thousands,

In many lands,

Whenever summer came to them,

Rising

Out of the patience of patience,

To leaf and bud and look up

Into the blue sky

Or, with thanks,

Into the rain

That would feed

Their thirsty roots

Latched into the earth-

Sandy or hard, Vermont or Arabia,

What did it matter,

The answer was simply to rise

In joyfulness, all their days.

Have I found any better teaching?

Not ever, not yet.

Last week I say my first Botticelli

And almost fainted,

And if I could I would paint like that

But am shelved somewhere below, with a few songs

About roses: teachers, also, of the ways

Toward thanks, and praise.

Mary paints with words, roses with petals, and golden age artists with strokes of color. All teach us to rise in joy, giving prayers and thanks. What else do they teach us? Beauty yes, but what of the thorns? Looking deeper would we see a prickly poet and a painter who fears women? Inside all are evolved harsh lessons, to fear and to protect.

When I was a child I often walked among my father’s rose garden. The flowers were nice, but I entered my father’s world with trepidation. In the rose plants not only were there thorns and reminders of my father’s tough standards, but other risks. The roses were full of bees, ants, spiders, Japanese beetles, and toxins my father sprayed on the roses to keep them whole, to keep them safe.

Roses do teach me to give thanks and praise, and also, in that gratitude, rightly claim the stabbing pain of this world as beauty too.

Today, I ask you to join me in looking out at the “harsh” reality of the world, and breathe once in and out together, and feel the energy of the wholeness.

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?