In Your Hands

The dog, the donkey, surely they know they are alive.

Who would argue otherwise?...

What about the sunflowers?...

Listen, all you have to do is start and there'll be no stopping....

And, speaking of stones, what about the little ones you can

hold in your hands their heartbeats so secret

so hidden it make take years

before, finally you hear them?

In the recent interview with Mary Oliver, she was asked what she had done with her one wild and precious life. She responded, "I used up a lot of pencils...... What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy. And I learned to consider my life an amazing gift. Those are the things."

The subtext of what I believe she has done with her life,  as this poem suggests, is to listen so that she could see, hear, feel, and know love. 

If we listen hard enough I believe that not only will we find beauty everywhere, but also love.  I don't know which comes first or which might be causal, I only know that as I listen in the night, the barred owl asks, "Who loves for you?"

May I answer, "I do."  May we answer, "We do."  Loving is after all in our hands.

How do you listen to love?  

A River Far Away and Long Ago

The river

Of my childhood,

That tumbled

Down a passage of rocks

And cut-work ferns,

Came here and there

To the swirl

And slowdown

Of a pool

And I say myself-

Oh, clearly-

As I knelt at one-

Then I saw myself

As if carried away,

As the river moved on.

Where have I gone?

Since then

I have looked and looked

For myself,

Not sure

Who I am, or where,

Or, more importantly, why.

It’s okay-

I have had a wonderful life.

Still, I ponder

Where that other is-

Where I landed,

What I thought, what I did,

What small or even maybe meaningful deeds

I might have accomplished

Somewhere

Among strangers,

Coming to them

As only a river can-

Touching every life it meets-

That endlessly kind, that enduring.

The other Mary that is endlessly kind and enduring I see in the deer along the river bank This doe, gentle and mild, may this day be s too fearful to look into her reflection in the pool, for she is on guard for predators. If, we, the prey and predators, were to ponder and slow down, would we see that we flow with life in the form of Ghandi, Jesus, the newborn child, and the mother duck who gives her life over to the snake to protect her eggs? If we were to come upon this river and pause, would we not be tempted to take a leap of faith and jump in? I know I am, and mourn that I hold back.

What would that be like if were to go out our doors today as the sleepy rays of the sun come over the hills, and see the stream of life alive in everything? And then jump in. going where the moment takes us, to strangers, to pain, and to no purpose whatsoever, and in that process we wash the wounds of the world with kindness.

Where would you like to take a leap of faith, and yet hesitate?

Ribbon Snake in the Sun

I came upon him and he is

Startled; he glides

To the rock’s rim; he wheels, setting in motion

The stripes of his body, yet not going

Anywhere. And, though the books say

It can’t e done, since his eyes are set

Too far apart in the narrow skull, I’m not

Lying when I say that he lifts his face and looks

Into my eyes and I look back until

We are both staring hard

At each other. He wants to know

Just where in this bright, blue-faced world

He might be safe. He wants to go on with the

Flow of his life. Then he straightens

His shining back and drops

From the rocks and rockets through

The tangle of weeds, sliding, as he goes, over

My bare foot. Then it vanishes

Into the shade and the grass, down to

Some slubby stream, having

Startled me in return. But there is a

Small matter. What I would speak of, rather,

Is the weightless string of his actually soft and

Nervous body; the nameless stars of its eyes.

They say it can’t be done. We humans, cannot look into the face of other beings, and see the stars of the universe. We cannot look into own demise and know that we are all descended from the death of stars. We cannot see that each hatching and birth brings an inherent worthy being into this world, a star. We cannot live in peace.

I am of the dissenter church for I say it can be done. We meet in that nailed together Hodge podge of someone else’s garbage that you find on urban littered streets, in oil sludged waterways, in razed forests, and in orphanages and gangs that harbor and harm children. There our witness says that if flowers can bloom amongst the garbage, then we know that the stars look favorably upon us, not from above, but through the eyes of another. What I mean to say that to look at tree, flower, child, or snake is to look in a mirror and see glory. I say we can live in peace.

For today, breathe in with me peace, and then breathe out with love. If we can do this in one breathe, we may do it in many.

The Poet With His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that jubilation and water-fun and you can stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can drip with despair all afternoon and still, on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush, puffing out its spotted breast, will sing of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

I am reminded by this poem of a goodly number of years which I spent with my face in hands, sobbing with regrets and loss. I tried to stifle the sound, for indeed, who wants to hear any more of that sound? I had seen such senseless tragedy in Guatemala when I lived there - forests burned, people murdered, children abandoned to disease and ignorance, parrot nests felled, and birds poached to approaching extinction. Some days it seemed that if I even heard the word Guatemala, conservation, or parrot my throat would get tight and I would be altered in a downward decline for the rest of the day. Part of what brought me out of that dark time was to go ahead and let the despair take me to where it would, however, I would remind myself that I was going through such pain because of the beautiful song of the people and the Yellow-naped Amazon parrots of Central America. It was that perfect, stone-hard beauty which allowed me to hold the tragic as well.

What helps you hold the tragic?