More Evidence - Part 3

3.

It is salvation if one can step forth from the clutter of one’s mind into that open space-that almost holy space-called work.

Emerson: how the elegance of his language can make me weep over my own inadequacy…

Do you hear the rustle and outcry on the page?

Do you hear it’s longing?...

4. 

Let laugher come to you now and again, that sturdy friend.

The impulse to leap off the cliff, when the body falsely imagines it might fly, may be restrained by reason, also by modesty.  Of the two possibilities, take your choice, and live.

Refuse all cooperation with the heart’s death.

5.

 Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be musical inside yourself.

Yesterday I visited Kaieteur Falls in central Guyana.  Here is the tallest single drop falls in the world.  While there we saw a pair of Red and Green Macaws circle through the rising mist of the falls, their calls echoing down the canyons and down deep in our souls.   


At the head of the falls are immense cliffs, to which we were invited to crawl onto our stomachs and peer over.  In between dizzy spells, I watched the White-collared Swifts approach the falls and then in twos and threes dive straight down the vertical wall of water,  twittering amongst themselves as they left us behind on the cliffs.  I would not be exaggerating to say that we experienced an impulse to follow them, and perhaps we did.  Somehow watching them and the macaws it was as if we ourselves were flying as they, the rainbow rulers and aerobatic champions of the falls.

Let us choose not to be restrained by either modesty or reason, but jump over the edge of perceived separateness so that we may put to death our egos so our hearts may yet live and our spirits at last soar.

What might you choose to day so that your heart may live and your spirit soar?

Lark Ascending - Back from Guyana

I am now back from Guyana, and this my first morning, spent some time looking at the pictures that do no real justice to the beauty there.  Two in particular are my favorites - Kaieteur Falls and a pair of Red and Green Macaws flying in front of the falls.  They are rising in the cloudy mists of the thunderous water.  As so frequently, such a coincidence that Mary's poem is of birds rising to the clouds. So I include those pictures here for you.  The rest of the poems that will finish out this 15.5 months of Mary's poems, were all written while in Guyana.

Lark Ascending

galloped up into the  morning air

then floated

a long way

whispering, I imagine,

to the same mystery

I try to speak to

down here. ...

if I could

carry a message of thanks

to the doors of the clouds.

I don't know whether it would be

of the or the mind. I know

it's the poem I have yet to make

There are so many ways to give thanks - poets do so with their words, birds perhaps in their own way with their songs, and children with their giggling runs.  Writing, singing, laughing - these are but just three ways to live the day in gratitude.  I imagine there are thousands of ways.  Here are some of mine:

Looking up at the stars and smiling

Bowing to the trees

Kissing the ground

Hugging a person

Identifying a bird species

Biking instead of driving the car

Writing this blog

What are some of your ways of giving thanks?

I Worried

I worried a lot.  Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direct, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not, how shall

I correct it?

Was I right or wrong...

Will I ever be able to sing...

Is my eyesight fading....

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing

And give it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

I imagine that all over the world, minds awake with worry, often long before the sun rises and long before enough rest has been gained.  Just this morning I was up in the wee hours, thinking of final arrangements for my trip to Guyana. 

What I wonder is that beyond worrying there exist greater possibilites of what we could do with this day, and all our days.  First off - learn a new song and a new dance step.  Second, go outside and try to outcompete even the melodious thrasher who waltzes over the ground.  Third, repeat as necessary and as often as possible throughout day.

Let us join together and vow to drop one "worry" off our list, and replace it with praise.

How many days have you spent worrying about something, and have missed the chance for greater possibility?

How I Got to the Woods

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run my unconcerned. I can hear the almost unbearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

I tell you I’d like to pray with Mary. 

I’d like to go on a hadj to her part of the world and bow down near the pond in humility and adoration.

I’d like to offer confessions to the ducks and trees that knew how to listen in their feathered and barked way.

I’d like to meditate in the fields, and perhaps share a smile with Mary as the hawk flies over with something still and furry.

I have gone to the woods for years as my church and temple, but so much of it is alone. 

Once when I was sitting on a hilltop in Guatemala, a jararundi (small wild cat) approached me from the trees and bounded by me only a few feet away.

Sometimes it helps to have the prayers answered, to know you are lovable and loving.

How do you pray?

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs….

4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,

The dancer, the potter,

To make me a begging bowl

Which I believe

My soul needs.

And if I come to you,

To the door of your comfortable house

With unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,

Will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.

I would like to give you this chance.

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.

Congratulations, if

You have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.

Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure-

Your life-

What would do for you?

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
through with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

Someday I feel like a child playing in the meadow, while bombs fly over head and digging parties put friends into the ground next to where I stare in wonder at the trees.  What do I mean by this?  Some days I grow weary of fighting – I just want to love the world. 

For instance I am at a bird conference now.  Many of these people, if not most, have wild parrots as companions in their home, or raise them for various reasons, including making a livelihood.  I am mostly of the clan, “mutual other” where I see birds as beings with their own inherent worth and dignity. After years of studying them in the wild, my heart hurts to have them in captivity where we humans make most of the choices for them.  Those surrounding me are mostly of the clan, “utilitarian.”  Humans have ultimate control over birds and it is not an ethical dilemma to control them and place them into our lives, where the birds live quite differently from their natural and evolved behavior.  Truly I guess that all of us belong to both clans, to the one clan called earth.

So I find myself torn – is it possible to fight with one’s self for any worthwhile reason? How do I speak of my truth, of my longing, and of my pain while letting the other know that I hold their needs tenderly and that we are of the family of things?

I go to the other, hold out my begging bowl, and ask them to fill it with their beauty.

As our cups fill together, may we forget to love only ourselves, and instead love the world.

Love the world…them’s good fighting words!

To whom or to what do you hold out your begging bowl today?

There Are a Lot of Mockingbirds in this Book

Yes, there are many

of those wondrous creatures

who live in the thorns

and are musical all day...

but this isn't nature

in which such birds

want, each pair,

their own few acres-

this isn't nature

where the sweetest things,

being hidden in leaves

and thorn-thick bushes

reveal themselves rarely-

this is a book

of the heart's rapture,

of hearing and praising

and  never forgetting

so that the world

is what the world is

in a long lifetime:

singer after singer

bursts from the thorn bush,

now, and again, and again,

their songs in the mind forever.

  

Isn't that what each are - singers in thorn bushes?  Somehow, during the course of the day we manage to reveal our true, wondrous selves and this song builds the world as it is.

Which is a world where no acres belong to anyone

Where beauty and love are ever revealed

Where the day is full of hearing songs of wonder

And our responding praise   -

pulling thorns from those have burst forth

or have yet to escape.

What thorns might you remove today?

Li Po and the Moon

There is the story of the old Chinese poet:

At night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming

And singing

Then drowned as he reached for the moon’s reflection.

Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been

As desperate.

Not the moon, though.

Let me just be cantankerous this one day.  I can’t help it, or so I say. When I hear or sense a separation between myself from the rest of existence, I want to balk and say, “it’s not so!”  In this case, moons have been known to fall into their earth’s gravitational pull and lose themselves as they explode into planetary merger.  They become one heavenly body or trillions upon trillions of particles swirling about in the universe’s ocean.  Either way, it’s the end of their separate selves for they cannot deny the pull of the other.  Moons swoon as much as do we.

For whom or what shall you swoon today?

Yellow

There is the heaven we enter

through institutional grace

and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing

in the lowly puddle.

The evidence of grace is all around us.  Like me though, do you forget?  Perhaps then this is what I have most distilled from a year with Mary Oliver; My constant reading and reflecting of her poems has opened my heart a bit more to the beauty before me, even in the previously most mundane circumstances.

I smile to think of goldfinches, their sharply painted wings a blur with frenzied enjoyment.  This day, and all days, may I so also learn to smile at the fussiness of humans who blur their egos defending "the right way" with the grace of interdependence.  Through our smiles, may there then be singing as we bathe in the light of love in the institutions so designed to bring heaven to earth and her beings. 

Where might you smile today where before you judged?

This is the One

The bear who shuffles over the hillsides filling himself

With berries until his tongue is purple (which remember, is a royal color)

The bear who circles the cabin, who will not steal the honey, who will not rifle the knapsack

Of the sleeping camper-the one who sits by himself by the river,

Who sings to himself the secret song ho one has ever heard-the bear

Who yawns with the cavernous mouth of a shaggy god-who, when he sees me

Is solidly silent and rises on the mass of his legs, disdainful and free

As anything on earth could ever be-this is the bear I want to see.

We came out of Africa and out of the wilderness, but we have not wavered from the gods of our fearful focus.  Just like the snake a few days’ blog ago, we wake up when we see a bear.  Having lived in Alaska, nothing brings me more to full attention over a campfire that is luring me into sleepiness, than this sentence “When I was on the trail and ran into a grizzly…”  Truly though if we had lost limb, life, or love to snake, shark, or bear, would we truly prefer the wild one and not the beaten down old bear in a circus? 

I remember the story of a young woman who was attached by coyotes a year ago in Eastern Canada. She had been out on her own when the pack attacked and killed her.  Her mother, surely bereaved, did not blame the wild canines and did not want them hunted down for their actions.  She believed that we always need wildness, and that wilderness tracts are not human’s home alone, but the home of many.  We take our risks to see that which is free.

How much risk are you willing to take?

What risks are you willing to take?

Carrying The Snake To The Garden

In the cellar

was the smallest snake

I have ever seen.

It coiled itself

in a corner

and watched me

with eyes

like two little stars

set into coal,

and a tail

that quivered.

One step

of my foot

and it fled

like a running shoelace,

but a scoop of the wrist

and I had it

in my hand.

I was sorry

for the fear,

so I hurried

upstairs and out the kitchen door

to the warm grass

and the sunlight

and the garden.

It turned and turned

in my hand

but when I put it down

it didn't move.

I thought

it was going to flow

up my leg

and into my pocket.

I thought, for a moment,

as it lifted it's face,

it was going to sing.

And then it was gone.

We evolved to focus our attention on nonhuman animals - we were predators and we were prey. Somehow we dealt with this tension to bring other species into our communities to help feed us, keep us clothed, and provide transportation, work, and protection.  Somewhere in all that evolved circuitry I also imagine that we desired company.  This is such a tangled web today.  Our brain patterns say: flee, eat, befriend, love, capture, free, destroy, conserve.   So it is no wonder that animals capture our attention and are one of the top draws for news and entertainment, as well as for philosophical and language studies.

I perhaps appear very ratio national as I describe Mary's response to the snake, that she hears him/her sing.  I am far from consistent or clear on my response with animals, including snakes.

 I once was up in the high mountains of California in a hunting cabin one night.  I was the guest of a 5th generation California, a hunter and fisher, and spent the time there with him and all his similarly focused buddies. The conversation that night was "snake stories."  Each man, hardened and wise from endless miles of traversing the peaks, confessed to being afraid of snakes and gave examples of snake encounters. I thought, and forgive me, "what a bunch of pussies!"

The next day I was out fly fishing with a buddy.  He would fish one pool, and I the next.  I had just passed him and was going over a small rise to the next spot on the river when a rattler lifted her head right where I was to put my foot.  I threw my rod down (oh forgive me again ye gods of fishing), ran back to my friend, and threw myself in his arms.  Yes, I had now joined the ranks of the honest and the embarrassed.

I wrote this beginning piece well before the sun rose, as  I was out all day participating in the local Christmas Bird Count.  We "owled" an hour before sunrise and stood on a rise listening for Wood Cocks and hour after sunset.  This was a day of wonder, which included much walking in fields finding and indentifying sparrows.  We formed sparrow lines and walked in patterns to cover our territory.   In one such field, the man next to me cried out and jumped towards me.  He had put his foot down inches from a Water Moccasin.  Our line collapsed to gape at the snake, whose lifted head was all mouth agape, ready to defend if necessary through teeth and toxins. 

In that fearful, focused awestruck moment while sparrows sang, we joined with them, singing the same song, the first song, and the only song. 

What song do you hear when you fear something or someone?

One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day

1. 
  
Fat, 
black, slick, 
galloping in the pitch 
of the waves, in the pearly 
  
fields of the sea, 
they leap toward us, 
they rise, sparkling, and vanish, and rise sparkling, 
they breathe little clouds of mist, they lift perpetual smile, 
  
they slap their tails on the waves, grandmothers and grandfathers 
enjoying the old jokes, 
they circle around us, 
they swim with us - 
  
2. 
  
a hundred white-sided dolphins 
on a summer day, 
each one, as God himself 
could not appear more acceptable 
  
a hundred times, 
in a body blue and black threading through 
the sea foam, 
and lifting himself up from the opened 
  
tents of the waves on his fishtail, 
to look 
with the moon of his eye 
into my heart, 
  
3. 
  
and find there 
pure, sudden, steep, sharp, painful 
gratitude 
that falls - 
  
I don't know - either 
unbearable tons 
or the pale, bearable hand 
of salvation 
  
on my neck, 
lifting me 
from the boat's plain plank seat 
into the world's 
  
4. 
  
unspeakable kindness. 
It is my sixty-third summer on earth 
and, for a moment, I have almost vanished 
into the body of the dolphin, 
  
into the moon-eye of God, 
into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea 
with everything 
that ever was, or ever will be, 
  
supple, wild, rising on flank or fishtail - 
singing or whistling or breathing damply through blowhole 
at top of head.  Then, in our little boat, the dolphins suddenly gone, 
we sailed on through the brisk, cheerful day. 

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

How do your joy poems grow?

With dolphin swims and human whims

And so my own heart grows.

I once swam with dolphins. They were captives in a tourist park near Cancun Mexico.  I kept telling myself that I wasn't part of the oppressive system that ruled these wild ones for the whims of tourists. I was there as a veterinarian consultant and was offered a chance to be with these sea-going mammals as a gift.  Into the pool I went and the dolphins barely acknowledged me as each put a nose to my foot, and then propelled me through the water. It was a photogenic moment, a picture taken that I've not seen in years.

I wonder what happed to those dolphins?  Are they still pushing round tourists through their water pens?  Shame arises with me over my past participation in such a scheme when I see dolphins playing around the coasts of Florida now. They seem so free, so wild, so themselves, and hence so much of God before me. 

I wonder where else I have captured joy, and therefore turned from God before me, in me, all around me.

They who bind to themselves a joy

Do the winged life destroy

But they who kiss the joy as it flies

Live in eternity's sunrise (adapted from William Blake)

            

Now Comes the Long Blue Cold

Now comes the long blue cold

And what shall I say but that some

Bird in the tree of my heart

Is singing.

The same heart that only yesterday

Was a room shut tight, without dreams.

Isn't it wonderful the cold wind and

Spring in the heart inexplicable.

Darling girl. Picklock.

There is a saying that is often in my head, “surprised by love.”  I don’t know why love should be a surprise, because the world is so beautiful.   I forget though. One moment thoughts are all dark and gloom, and then, and let me say it, through grace love arises.  Like the sun ever faithful, love will come again.

Sometimes though relief comes not soon enough.  As the pain tortures us cold disconnection seems everlasting. But just when you think you can’t take it anymore, love’s sorrow does its work to open the heart.  In this case it’s not like a picklock, but more like a thief dynamiting a safe. 

Let me today blow up the allusion of safety, exploding my heart so that love and beauty may be enter freely.

When have you been surprised by love?