Four Sonnets - Part 1

1.       There appeared a darkly sparkling thin hardly bigger than a pin, that all afternoon  seemed to want my company,  It did me no hurt but wandered my shirt, my sleeve cuff, my wrist…

Oh, distant relative, we will never speak to each other a single kind word. And yet, in this world, it is no small thing to sparkle.

I am in Guyana and there are millions of things here I know not the name of – insects that bite and hum and chirp and whistle.  Along our walks today I hear a constant toning of a mediation bell, and it is a bee I am told.  Even if it is a large bee, it remains such a small thing to invoke the trees to bend in the wind as eaves in a chapel.  Out there with them I pray that I am aware that all beings sparkle.

What small things are with you in your life?

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?

From This River, When I Was a Child, I Used to Drink

But when I came back I found

That the body of the river was dying.

“Did it speak?”

Yes, it sang out the old songs, but faintly.

“What will you do?

I will grieve of course, but that’s nothing.

“What, precisely, will you grieve for?”

For the river.  For myself, my lost

Joyfulness. For the children who will not

Know what a river can be – a friend, a

Companion, a hint of heaven.

“Isn’t this somewhat overplayed?”

I said: it can be a friend.  Companion.  A hint of heaven.

Here I am back in Guatemala after a 6 month absence. When last here I posted my blogs in the form of tweets. Somehow this seemed appropriate to use a medium of communication that relates to the diminishing bird song.  The calls of Scarlet Macaws are long gone from nearly all of Guatemala, and the Yellow-naped Amazon calls are fainter each time I come.  I mourn.

There was a time when I was unsure of my mourning. It was if I was the only one who knew how abundant the harmony of multiple species of parrot calls here was in the south coast of Guatemala.  People who would see my tears and read my words wondered if I was overplaying the loss. They hadn’t looked into the regretful eyes of older campesinos who tell stories of macaws, amazons, and parakeets all nesting in one giant tree.  Now it’s hard to find even the trees, let alone the birds.

In this poem Mary repeats to the skeptic about her friendship with the river. Perhaps she too has felt isolated with the rivers going with no one on the shores to grieve with her, as if the river song was nothing of importance.  But it is.  Mary, you, and I have company now as the rivers leave us high and dry.

In the book, Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, I red yesterday how psychologists, counselors, therapists, and scientists are increasingly aware of the illness and woundedness of humans who witness ecological devastation and extinction.  Writes Mary Watkins in the chapter, Creating Restorative Ecotherapuetic Practices, “I grasped and acknowledged that the plant and animal worlds were a source of primary attachment, a significant contributor to their (her patients) resilience in the face of great difficulties and disappoints in human life, and a wellspring of faith in beauty and goodness.”  Rivers, trees, birds, mountains, oceans, and flowers all befriend our kind.  So I am glad that it is more mainstream to grieve together as a community of mixed species.  That’s step one and it is hardly nothing.  We must hear and sing death songs, as Mary describes in my blog of two days go.  But what next?

What will you do?

 

Visiting the Graveyard

When I think of death

It is a bright enough city,

And every year more faces there

Are familiar

But not a single one

Notices me,

Though I long for it,

And when they talk together,

Which they do

Very quietly,

It’s in an unknowable language-

I can catch the tone

But understand not a single word-

And when I open my eyes

There’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.

There are the stones.

In the silence of this retreat I hear death speaking to me. There’s the creak in my knees as I unfold my legs again and again, rising and falling into the sitting cushion. The wind in the Spanish Moss whispers of times past and times yet to come. The clank of dishes, the cough, the sigh, the bell, the clapper, and my own urine splash and tinkle in the bathroom, all these death and life. The chickadee, perky with her dark cap, won’t be alive in a few more years, so short this species’ span of life. But now I hear her high in the oak, already dead before she hatched. I wish I could speak this language. So I sit, I strain, I listen. After each mediation I open my eyes. I see the beautiful tree, a grave marker on my heart, breaking it open, weighing me down with stones, until I am so deep in the earth that I am one with all.

Where and how does the language of death come to you?

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Just yesterday I wrote about doorways into loving and Mary uses a similar metaphor today, and so well. I wish I had this poem years ago when I was asked by a pilot in Afghanistan how to pray with her troops. She was leading a group stationed at a mountain airfield and they were coming under daily fire, and were dropping bombs on villages with innocent people. She said her troops were despairing and she asked me how she might pray with them. Our means of communication was email through the computer on her bomber. I don't remember what I said exactly, but it was something like this: Name the sorrow and fear. Name the thanks. Allow silence at the end so each individual's voice may be heard, and also so each could listen to the voices that arise.

So my prayer today would be:

Spirit of life, God and love of our hearts, I am grateful for the love within and without. I regret all those times I am not open to this love and keep it from reaching the depths within and without. Let me be quiet now in this moment, so I may listen within and without.....

What is your prayer today?

Percy (Four) and What I Said at Her Service - September 18, 2010

I went to church.
I walked on the beach
And played with Percy.

I answered the phone
And paid the bills
I did the laundry.

I spoke her name
A hundred times.

I knelt in the dark
And said some holy words.

I went downstairs,
I watered the flowers.
I fed Percy.

What I Said at Her Service

When we pray to love God perfectly,
Surely we do not mean only.

(Lord, see how well I have done.)

With just a little bit of luck, and grace, overseen by our glancing intentions, we may discover that our imperfect lives are a prayer to God. For out of the love lost and relationships broken is the lived testament to a world that paradoxically broke our hearts so that we might love more. It is our very longing that is our healing. And so Mary goes through her days and prays and plays. A perfect life riddled with pain, torn asunder so that love expands ever more giving ever more space for her to commit her life to pen and paper, feeding us.

Encounter - January 21, 2010

I lift the small brown mouse..

..He has no more to say..

.."Poor creature" I might say,

but what's the use of that.

The clock in him is broken.

And for ceremony,

Already the leaves have swirled

Over, the wind has spoken.

So many speaking, not speaking. The mouse is quiet, the poet is quiet in the poem, the wind speaks, the poet speaks in writing the poem, I speak now, and you listen. Maybe there isn't really anything to say, for no matter what we say our bodies keep track of the passing of the seasons and our lives. The great orator and poet of this existence is not any of us singled out on the path, dead, not-dead, but the winds of change that move us in our daily encounters with one another and a harsh, exciting reality.

How does the wind of change, chaos, and death move you? For you, today, is it a fierce wind or gentle breeze, or are you becalmed?