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?  

On the Beach

On the beach, at dawn:

four small stones clearly

hugging each other.

How many kinds of love

might there be in the world,

and how many formations might they make

and who am I ever

 to imagine I could know

such a marvelous business?

When the sun broke

it poured willingly its light

over the stones

that did not move, not at all,

just as, to its always generous term,

it shed its light on me,

my own body that loves

equally to hug another body

As a biologist, and a veterinarian, I have seen amazing variety in how animals express their bonding, gender, and sexuality, and I am learning all the time how this is true too in the human animal.  Just last night I saw a program about transgendered people, and a few years back I married a transgender couple and gave a sermon on the topic at my congregation.  Bodies and minds are such fascinating, awesome conglomerations of physics, physiology, chemistry, and biology, and then the macro-output comes out as one body hungering for the touch and affection of another in apparent infinite possibility, much of it beauty beyond words. I say "much of it" because harm can be mixed in with the body's powerful emotions and desires. So much of our ever present subconscious wiring motivates us, and also evades our understanding resulting in actions that are regretable. I speak of deceit, physical harm, and sexual abuse.

There is risk to responding to the body's intent, however I for one am glad that we live in age where the light of understanding "human" has shed a light on how to nurture healthy relationships. We know that we are capable of great love and remarkable companionship, as well as tragic actions and mournful  decisions.

I pray that today I, and others, will choose love and beauty over tragedy.

What choices are before you this day?

Mysteries, Yes - February 14, 2011

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of lambs...

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Ah, my spiritual practice for the day...

Look

Laugh

Lower my self

What will you practice today so that you may live the questions?

At the River Clarion

1.

I don't know who God is exactly.

But I'll tell you this.

I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a

water splashed stone

and all afternoon I listened to the voices

of the river talking....

And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me

what they were saying.

Said the river I am part of holiness.

And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered

the moss beneath the water.

I'd been to the river before, a few times.

Don't blame the river that nothing happened quickly.

You don't hear such voices in an hour or a day.

You don't hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.

And it's difficult to hear anything anyway, through

all the traffic, the ambition.

2.

If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck. 
He's also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke… 

If God exists he isn't just churches and mathematics. 
He's the forest, He's the desert. 
He's the ice caps, that are dying. 

He's the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts. 
He's van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell. 
He's the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons. 
He's every one of us, potentially. 
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet. 
And if this is true, isn't it something very important?

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and

each of you too, or at least

of his intention and his hope....

3.

Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.

Let us live it, gesture by gesture.

When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?

And should we not thank the knife also?

We do not live in a simple world.

4.

There was someone I loved who grew old and ill

One by one I watched the fires go out.

There was nothing I could do

except to remember

that we receive

then we give back...

5.

I pray for the desperate earth.

I pray for the desperate world.

I do the little each person can do, it isn't much.

Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves....

6.

And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them,

for heaven's sakes-

the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,

they are so happily obedient.

While I sit here in a house filled with books,

ideas, doubts, hesitations.

7.

And still, pressed deep into  my mind, the river

keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its

long journey, its pale, infallible voice

singing.

A quick review on the internet shows this to be one of Mary's more popular later poems.  For me, I enjoy it so very much because it speaks of an answer to old age, death, loss, and suffering.  What can we do but to remember that we receive, and that our response is to give back? For God is in my arthritic knees, my mother's dementia, my sister's cancer, and in the extinction of the parrots and the people.  I'm going to have to listen very, very hard to hear the singing in such times as these.

Is your house full of ideas? Doubts?  Hesitations? Prayer? Singing?

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?

Then Bluebird Sang - January 14, 2010

Bluebirds slipped a little tremble out of the triangle of his mouth

And it hung in the air until it reached my ear

Like a froth or a frill that Schumann

Might have written in a dream.

Dear morning you come with so many angels of mercy

So wondrously disguised in feathers, in leaves,

In the tongues of stones, in the restless waters,

In the creep and the click and the rustle

That greet me wherever I go

With their joyful cry: I’m still here, alive!

My angels of mercy this morning:

Tropical lofty clouds framing the ocean with the light of the new born sun

A stranger who offered me her apartment while I visit Puerto Rico

The stray dog, the stray cat, my stray thoughts

The chance to serve, and to be served

The creep and the click of my arthritic knees

To breathe. 

Who or what are you angels of mercy this day?

The Poet Comments on Yet Another Approaching Spring

Don’t flowers put on their

Prettiness each spring and

Go to it with

Everything they’ve got? Who

Would criticize the bed of

Yellow tulips or the blue

Hyacinths?

So put a

Bracelet on your

Ankle with a

Bell on it and make a

Little music for

The earth beneath your foot, or

Wear a hat with hot-colored

Ribbons for the

Pleasure of the

Leaves and the clouds, or at least

A ring with a gleaming

Stone for your finger; yesterday

I watched a mother choose

Exquisite ear-ornaments for someone

Beloved, in the spring

Of her life; they were

For her for sure, but also it seemed

A promise, a love message, a commitment

To all girls, and boys too, so

Beautiful and hopeful in this hard world

And young.

Yesterday Mary spoke of children who look out on a broken world. We the readers, and certainly myself, wondered what to do with that deep sorrow, and perhaps even despair. Here, a day later, Mary speaks to my heart and outlines my strategy. Let us know that there is both tragedy, and beauty in the world, and let us help our children see this. Surely every child born will look out on fragmented and wounded lives. We cannot stop this. This doesn’t keep us from doing all we can to mend that brokenness that seems far too difficult a task to “fix” in one lifetime or even thousands. Knowing that the arc of the moral universe bends so very slowly towards justice, what can we do while we wait for the beloved community to come into being? I think we might also commit our lives to beauty and to joy. For when we do, if even for one fleeting moment, we give others a chance to rejoice in the splendor of our world . May we so do this, giving hope in our hard world.

Where do you adorn your life for the sake of beauty and hope?

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?

More Beautiful than the Honey Locust Tree Are the Words of the Lord

1.

In the household of God, I have stumbled in recitation,

and in my mind I have wandered.

I have interrupted worship with discussion.

Once I extinguished the Gospel candle after all the others.

But never held the cup to my mouth lagging in gratitude.

2.

The Lord forgives many things,

so I have heard..

3.

The deer came into the field.

I saw her peaceful face and heard the shuffle of her breath.

She was sweetened by merriment and not afraid,

but bold to say

whose field she was crossing: spoke the tap of her foot:

It is God's and mine."

But only that she was born into the poem that God made, and

called the world....

6.

It's close to hopeless,

for what I want to say the red-bird

has said already, and better, in a thousand trees.

The white bear, lifting one enormous paw, has said it better.

You cannot cross one hummock or furrow but it is

His holy ground.

7.

I had such a longing for virtue, for company.

I wanted Christ to be as close as the cross I wear.

I wanted to read and serve, to touch the altar linen.

Instead I went back to the woods where not a single tree

turns its face away.

Instead I prayed, oh Lord, let me be something

useful and unpretentious.

Even the chimney swift sings.

Even the cobblestones have a task to do, and do it well.

Lord, let me be a flower, even a tare; or a sparrow.

Or the smallest bright stone in a ring worn by someone

brave and kind, whose name I will never know.

Lord, when I sleep I feel you near.

When I wake, and you are already wiping the stars away,

I rise quickly, hoping to be like your wild child

the rose, the honey-maker the honey-vine:

a bird shouting its joy as it floats

through the gift you have given us: another day.

Enough Mary! You are getting at something here that is uncomfortable.

As one author, Paul T. Corrigan, said of this volume, "Thirst," you elicit the human experience of tension between God and Earth. Your very title seeks to compare the two by saying that God's words are more beautiful than the locust tree. You would think it would not be much of a challenge, for as a child growing up in the Eastern U.S. I never found the Locust tree to be of much beauty. But then neither did I find God, his words, or his church to be much to bother about.

Times changed when I began to know of loss.

Since those dark times, my spiritual practice has been these last 15 years to find beauty in everything. Though I have not finished the journey, I go to others to ask these questions:

Is beauty in everything?

Is beauty enough?

In fact, I preached a sermon on this yesterday at the Unitarian Universalist Nature Coast congregation.

In my own experience, and in Mary's poems, I find my heart rate increase when I ask, "Why can't earth be enough?" and hear the answer, "It isn't." Like I fool, this response doesn't keep me from falling back in love over and over again with her. I also ask, "Why can't church be enough?" The answer too is, "It isn't" and damn my luck, I fall back in love over and over again with her.

Three months ago I left the parish ministry to serve as a community minister in multispecies ministry. I think it can be safely said then that I know of this tension between God and earth.. I hunger for God and thirst for reverence of the earth. There seems to always be something missing, and then suddenly everything is enough, and nothing is enough. I am a quiver of confusion and an arrow that I know not who points or where I will land.

A Native American legend is that the Thunder Spirit recognized his son by his ability to sit comfortably on locust branches, despite the thorns.

I don't know if comfort is too high a goal. Maybe though, me, no we - please join me - are truly Earth/God's children as we try to find more joy in a world where we are completely stuck. For out of these tensions, regeneration comes. Perhaps not just for us, but for the transformation of our society that comes from the wounds of loving Earth and God never enough.

In this poem, in this volume, the stakes are rising, and bless my heart, I am gaining insight into what exactly is at risk. It is the salvation of the earth's soul, which is also mine, and which is also Yours. Always.

Do you ever pit God against Earth? Do you accept both or neither?