First Days in San Miguel de Allende

1.

The flagellated Christ

is being carried

to San Miguel de Allende.

He must be very heavy

yet the carriers persist

upon the sun flashed road

and the people follow

in the same way that people would seek

a river heard of but never yet found.

they are that thirsty...

2.

I have come, for the first time, to Mexico.

And what has happened

to that intense ambition

with which I always wake?

Soaked up

in the colors, stolen

by the blood Christs.

I am feeling something, incredibly,

like peace...

3.

the tops of the northbound trains are dangerous.

Still, they are heaped with hopefuls.

I understand their necessity.

Understanding, however, it not sharing.

Oh, let there be a wedding of the

mind and the heart, if not today

then soon.

Meanwhile, let me change my own life

into something better.

Meanwhile, on the streets of San Miguel de Allende

it is easy to smile.

"Hola," I say to the children.

"Hi," they say, as I pass

with my passport, and money, in my pocket.

For many years I lived with the shame of being able to come and go from Mesoamerica, while I left my friends behind. They suffered violence, poverty, illness, brokenness, alcoholism, and dying children.  I could leave and they could not.  Now some of them are dead.

It is for that reason, in part, that we took into our homes two young men from Honduras who came up through Mexico on top of one of the trains that Mary speaks of - the Death Train.

Yes I know that all of life is journey towards death!  Yes I know that I can't save every child, bird, and tree!  Yes I know that there are pretty flowers to view along the dangerous path!

I know much and can learn more.

But for today, let there be a wedding of my heart and head.

May I vow with every breath, "I do!"

What is your vow today?

How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea

Somewhere down beach, in the morning, at water's edge, I found a sea turtle,

its huge head a smoldering apricot, its shell streaming with seaweed,

its eyes closed, its flipper motionless.

When I bent down, it moved a little.

When I picked it up, it signed.

Was it forty pounds, or fifty pounds, or a hundred?

Was it two miles back to the car?

We walked a little while, and then we rested, and then we walked on

I walked with my mouth open, my heart roared.

The eyes opened, I don't know what they thought.

Sometimes the flippers swam at the air.

Sometimes the eyes closed.

I couldn't walk anymore, and then I walked some more

while it turned into granite, or cement, but with that apricot-colored head,

that stillness, that Buddha-like patience, that cold-shocked but slowly beating heart.

Finally we reached the car.

The afternoon is the other part of this story.

Have you ever found something beautiful, and maybe just in time?

How such a challenge can fill you!

Jesus could walk over the water.

I had to walk ankle-deep in the sand, and I did it.

My bones didn't quite snap.

 Come on in, and see me smile.

I probably won't stop for hours.

Already, in the warmth, the turtle has raised its head, is looking around.

Today, who could deny it, I am an important person.

They say there are 9 Whooping Cranes at Payne's Prairie today - I am itching to be done with this blog so that I can run there to find something beautiful.  I think for the rest of this year I shall run towards beauty wherever I might find it so that I can be filled with challenge. 

Perhaps the real challenge is to see beauty everywhere, and let that love and awe fill us with bone snapping, urgent purpose.

Shall we all be important people this year?

How do you plan to be important this year?

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)

            

August

Our neighbor, tall and blonde and vigorous, the m other of many children, is sick..;.

All summer the children, grown now and some of them with children, of their own, come to visit...

They all smile.

June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

So appropriate this piece on the eve of June, July, August and with the news today that the oil will continue to flow into the Gulf unto August. All summer. Everything seems wrong about this, and there is nowhere for the oil to go, safely, with health. If we cover our eyes to this tragedy, however, we would miss the laughter, the smile that is part of the oil, part of us, part of cancer, part of death. Some days though, what can we do but sit with our heads bowed, or held in the laps of others, silent with the ache of abundance in the midst of loss.

What is "wrong" before you this summer?