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?

Self-Portrait

I wish I was twenty and in love with life

and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!

There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side

the roses are blooming and finding their labor

no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea

shining like a song, like a body

I want to touch

though I'm not twenty

and won't be again but ah! seventy. And still

in love with life. And still

full of beans

So here it is Tuesday for me, and as I said in yesterday's blog, this is the day where I "hit the week running." Looking back at yesterday's "undoing" I pray that I gave enough time to touch the essence of life, so my love can fill over into compassion in the week to come.

Honestly, though, my listening never seems enough to take in all the love and wonder there is. As I meditate in the morning on our backyard porch I am ever distracted. First I see the gopher tortoise working on her burrow, splashing sand in an ever widening expanse, and then comes the chattering Pileated Woodpecker foraging on the ground with her ridiculous red top hat. I want to jump up from my cushion and go running out to be with them, to be a digger and a pounder. But I too, like Mary, have old legs. It takes a while to get up from the cushion as the arthritic pain signals my mid age.

A curse perhaps this age? Hmmm. Maybe not. For in my increasing stillness, my Monday day offs, my meditation, and my slowing down physically, I find that through my companions I am indeed running, digging, flying, giggling, playing soccer, and dancing with the best and worst of them. I am twenty again on the verge of adulthood just having scored a goal during soccer and I am the confused octarian with dementia in the home down the road.

Somehow in the alternating lost and found quality to our shared lives, may the blessing of loving life stay with us.

How do you paint your self-portrait? Where do you find that you are full of beans, running and climbing in spirit if not in spirit?

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

I wonder if trees are the true heroes of the world. Mostly they are in the background of sagas, fables, and myths. Now and then they rise to prominence, such as in the movies Lord of the Rings and Prince Caspian. The trees move, fight, and are on the good guy team. I don’t think though that we’ll ever see them as McDonald Happy Meal toys or action figures under the Christmas Tree. Ah, see that, there is a celebrated tree whose reverence dates back thousands of years when we prayed to trees and they responded.

When I was a small child I went to the woods. I would sing to the birds and to trees and would be at rest for a while. These were prayers of gratitude and a heart’s call to be one with them. In the rush of my days, I believe I forget this except when I am purposively on a nature walk, meditating in nature, or have been part of a conservation team studying parrots in some towering tropical tree. Deep down though I believe that here has not been a forgetting, for my subconscious knows that trees, at least for one such as me born in the southeast of the U.S.A, hold up my world with hope and beauty. Let me leave these words and go hug a tree in the morning light.

What do you think/feel when you hug a tree?

What I Have Learned So Far - September 5, 2010

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of -- indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

So much like E. B. White is Mary this morning. He wrote, "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." So like Mary, like E.B. White, we awake torn. So many plans are lit up with the first thought of sun's arising, and then the Barred Owl hoots or I recall a dream last night when two wild Scarlet Macaws flew down to me and invited me to hold them and to stroke their rainbow feathers. I am astonished into stillness, savoring each feeling and vision of that dream. I am in love. It burns. My soul flares with 5 more projects that spark from that dream. Is this what loves brings us to, crazy wild fires that take down the old forests and urge new seeds to grow? In my ignition, I am gone.

How do you balance saving and savoring?

Patience

What is the good life now? Why,

look here, consider

the moon's white crescent

rounding, slowly, over

the half month to still another

perfect circle-

the shining eye

that lightens the hills,

that lays down the shadows

of the branches of the trees,

that summons the flowers

to open their sleepy faces and look up

into the heavens.

I used to hurry everywhere,

and leaped over the running creeks.

There wasn't

time enough for all the wonderful things

I could think of to do

in a single day. Patience

comes to the bones

before it take root in the heart

as another good idea.

I say this

as I stand in the woods

and study the patterns

of the moon shadows,

or stroll down into the waters

that now, late summer, have also

caught the fever, and hardly move

from one eternity to another.

Here we go again, no answers as we teeter on the brink of relativism. Is there no absolute "good life" but only stages that we go through? The good for some is to hurry and do wonderful things in our earlier years, and for others a welcome idea is patience as we come to the edge of eternity's seduction in the form of decay, dying and death? I do believe that our experiences and our bodily sensations in our daily lives define how we may live the best that we may, offering us insight and wisdom.

I spent many months of my childhood on crutches with a knee gone bad and no current surgical techniques available to fix the injury. Rather abruptly I was forced to slow down in a big way, not able to run, catch balls, and jump over creeks with the other kids. It was in this time that I discovered reading and how much I loved my little parrot companion. Both kept me company during the painful healing and the reoccurring injuries. Eventually the doctors were able to stabilize the knee and I was able to run again, play sports, and take to the woods. I did not lose, however, the reading or the parrot companionship, and both are a big part of the good life for me today. My bones taught me in those years patience, and to accept what the body tells us is good for us, and what is painful. I pray today that I might be open to the very simple messages of my body, that this breath and this heart beat is what connects me to eternity and to you.