About Angels and About Trees - February 11, 2011

Where do angels
        fly in the firmament,
and how many can dance
        on the head of a pin?

Well, I don't care
        about that pin dance,
what I know is that
        they rest, sometimes,
in the tops of the trees

  and you can see them,
        or almost see them,
or, anyway, think: what a
        wonderful idea.

I have lost as you and
        others have possibly lost a
beloved one,
        and wonder, where are they now?

The trees, anyway, are
        miraculous, full of
angels (ideas);even
        empty they are a
good place to look, to put
        the heart at rest--all those
leaves breathing the air, so


peaceful and diligent, and certainly
        ready to be
the resting place of
        strange, winged creatures
that we, in this world, have loved

I have never lived on the ocean, but when I visit the eternal vista holds me in blissful transcendence.  So too have come to me the vistas of western mountains where you can see forever.  It was with some trepidation then when we moved to central Florida – no body of water, no mountains, no suns or moons rising on the horizon – just trees filling the view wherever you turn.

Florida has taught me to look up. Now I stare up into the branches as I might onto the ocean or from a mountain.  I strain to see who lives there, for surely there are some passing spring warblers daring me to behold their beauty.  Even if I don’t see any movement, I can hear the earth’s pulse through the miracle of the trees, and it echoes in my heart to last me through the day.

Today I am up in the level of the trees at a hotel at the University of Georgia, Athens. The trees are sprinkled with snow – natural angel dust to drug the soul with joy.

What do you see in a tree?

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

The story I tell of myself was that I was born a happy child.  I recall feeling such love for my siblings and parents, or at least empathy.  I had a sense of the drudgery of my father and mother. This didn't impact me greatly for I spent as much time as I could with birds, and flew free. Then somewhere in the growing up, I lost the ability for the over view, and returned to the mud and harshness of the terrestrial life. 

The span of these middle adult years had a lot of harsh landings, and a lot of escapist time up in the air.  Alternating between dreams and grounding may have been challenging, as I believe it is for most of us in our middle years, but what skills we acquire! Now is the time to fly low to the ground so we can wrap our wings around the suffering and the gorgeous. 

At what level do you fly today?

Prince Buzzard - January 9, 2010

Prince Buzzard,

I took you, so high in the air,

For a narrow boat and two black sails.

You were drifting

In the depths of the air

Wherever you wanted to go,

And when you came down

With your spoony mouth

And your read head

And your creaking wings

To the lamb

Dead, dead, dead

In the fields of spring

I knew it was hunger

That brought you’

Yet you went about it

So slowly,

Settling with hunched wings

And silent

As the grass itself

Over the lambs’s white body-

It seemed

a ceremony,

A pause

As though something

In the quick of your own body

Had come out

To give thanks

For the dark work

That was yours,

Which wasn’t to be done easily or quickly,

But thoroughly-

And indeed by time summer

Opened its green harbors

The fields was nothing but flower, flowers, flowers,

From shore to shore.

I am out on the edge of water this morning, the sun barely awake.  Over the Calooshatcee River in Ft. Myers the first Turkey Vultures begin to sail by around 9 a.m.  It’s cool, perhaps this is why .They await the heating of the day to form the thermals that bare them aloft. Or maybe, there just isn’t that much death so early in the day.

This is probably just another human delusion.  Beings and dreams have died all through the night, we just can’t see it.  Migrants of all kinds won’t make it to the next morning, whether it is blackbirds and doves falling from the sky or humans  from Mesoamerica, seeking a better life.  I am reminded of them as I went out this morning to buy coffee, finding it in a convenience store where I was the only non-native Spanish speaker.  They are here, and how many thousands are not, or will never know a life that flowers into full possibility? 

If I were brave, I would go out into the darkness with my flashlight and look for death to remind me that it all around, happening constantly though I sit here comfortable and pleasured, sipping coffee, on a deck of a house with a pool, Jacuzzi, multiple couches, and an HDTV.  No wait a minute. If I were truly brave, I would go out in the darkness with no light at all, and give myself over to death, so that there would be even more flowers on the morrow.  If I, if we, did this, then we might return to a world where the spattering of ducks and coots now on this river near me would cover this river from shore to shore?

Swans

They appeared
over the dunes,
they skimmed the trees
and hurried on

to the sea
or some lonely pond
or wherever it is
that swans go,

urgent, immaculate,
the heat of their eyes
staring down
and then away,

the thick spans
of their wings
as bright as snow,
their shoulder-power

echoing
inside my own body.
How could I help but adore them?
How could I help but wish

that one of them might drop
a white feather
that I should have
something in my hand

to tell me
that they were real?
Of course
this was foolish.

What we love, shapely and pure,
is not to be held,
but to be believed in.
And then they vanished, into the unreachable distance.

I once had a dream that turned into a music video with the refrain, "love ain't enough, but it ain't dead yet."  In the dream, a couple who had once loved each other passionately could not stay together.  They were so disappointed that love could die so easily.  Yet, they had a beautiful daughter together who was the embodiment of their love. When she grew up she gave her love to millions through the gift of music and song.

What I learned from this dream (or was I teaching myself?) was that love cannot be imprisoned, it must fly free which means that it can, and will, leave you.  But then if we just keep our hearts open, the love surprises us in amazing ways.

So we are to have faith that love exists and can, but not in the exact ways that love manifests.

Oh that I was so strong to have this be enough.  But like Mary, I am foolish. So at home I have a white wing feather from a Snowy Owl that I place before me as I meditate daily.  This feather helps draw me into this practice, which I might otherwise neglect.  Being of flesh and of this world, it helps to hold love now and then, and be likewise held.

Where are you foolish in love?

Crow Says

There is corn in the field,

what should I think of else?

Anyway, my thoughts are all feathery.

I prefer simple beak talk.

Maybe it's having wings.

It does make a difference.

As for that business about brothers,

of course I'm concerned that we

share the corn, to the extent

that I get my plenty.

As for later, how can "later" exist?

When old crows die I don't cry,

I peck at their silly, staring eyes

and open my wings and fly to

wherever I want to. I've forgotten

both father and mother,

even the pile of sticks

in which I was born. Well, maybe

now and again, and mostly in winter,

I have strange, even painful ruminations.

When you're hungry and cold

it's hard to be bold, so I sulk,

and I have dreams sometimes, in which

I remember the corn will come again,

and vaguely then I feel that I am almost feeling

grateful, to something or other.

Just yesterday I read about the emotional and social lives of crows and ravens.  They are quite smart.  They express complex emotions to others through voice and feather, use tools, and recognize human faces perhaps better than we can.  In addition, writes William Hagmen, "They play, communicate, and have the capacity to deceive.  They're smarter than any cat and most children.  They have strong family values.  Johan McGowan, (author of In the Company of Crows and Ravens") equates it with our society, saying crows come closer to man than any other species studied, including primates. Crow society is family-based, he said. There's a single breeding pair that has offspring that don't leave right away and help raise the next batch of offspring, just like people. Relationships are maintained and individuals can join up with each other years later. Like us, crows have territories and they gather in communal places. When you see a number of crows gathering, he said, 'those aren't gangs of crows, they're typically family groups that are helping each other make a living.'"

So, if I am to take Mary literally here in her understanding of crows, she is off the mark.  Yet, is she really speaking of crows?  Maybe she means me, and you.  We think we are somehow different than other beings. We may not have wings, but we've got something especially primate about us that sets us apart.  We hoard the harvests from fields and forget about our brothers and sisters.  Sometimes, when hard times come our way we let go of control and give in to dreams of interdependence and even touch gratitude.

Winter is coming - our first day below 40 degrees and I'm bundled up writing this.  Outside my window a fish crow calls, telling me that there is beauty in the chaotic and bountiful field of our existence, if not in benefit directly coming my way but in loving and compassionate thoughts I share with all beings.

Why today should I think of anything else?

Why should you?

Night Herons

Some herons were fishing in the robes of the night

At a low hour of the water’s body,

And the fish I suppose, were full

Of fish happiness in those transparent inches

Even as, over and over, the beaks jacked down

And the narrow bodies were lifted

With every quick sally,

And that was the end of them as far as we know-

Though, what do we know except that death

Is so everywhere and so entire-

Pummeling and felling,

Or sometimes,

Like this, appearing

Through such a thing door-

One stab and you’re through!

And what then?

Why, then it was almost morning,

And one by one the birds opened their wings and flew.

This morning it is brisk, colder than I have been in months. The reddish/pink sky patch of horizon in the east is crisscrossed by utility lines strung across dead trees now serving as telephone poles. You may think there is not much beauty in an urban landscape. Wait, perhaps I speak for myself. Then a marvel strikes through to your heart. Yesterday in this place of cars and noise, a bald-eagle flew over the road, hunting in the early hours. Someone will die today to feed this bird, and countless beings have died so that we are here today. I pray that I might know this death, let it stab me deeply, so that I use every molecule of nourishment that comes my way to fly, to liberate as I myself am liberated.

Where will you fly today?

A Note Left on the Door - September 20, 2010

There are these; the blue

Skirts of the ocean walking in now, almost

To the edge of town,

And a thousand birds, in their incredible wings

Which they think nothing of, crying out

That the day is long, the fish are plentiful.

And friends, being as kind as friends can be,

Striving to lift the darkness.

Forgive me, Lord of honeysuckle, of trees,

Of notebooks, of typewriters, of music,

That there are also these:

The lover, the singer, the poet

Asleep in the shadows.

We humans - mourning that we mourn, regretting that our nights are long, looking deep into the shadows, hoping not for dancing wings or flash of fish, but for what sleeps in our memory. I know not of Mary’s loss, but I feel it within me. For how many times today will I glance over the breakfast table and not see son, spouse, or the lightening day that still has not greeted the sun. May I not forget to greet sun or sun, and wake to what is here now.

What is your prayer today?

After Her Death

I am trying to find the lesson for tomorrow.
Matthew something. Which lectionary?
I have not forgotten the Way, but a little,
the way to the Way.
the trees keep whispering peace, peace,
and the birds in the shallows are full of the
bodies of small fish and are content.
They open their wings so easily, and fly.
So. It is still possible.

I open the book
which the strange, difficult, beautiful church
has given me. To Matthew. Anywhere.



Mary has lost her partner of many years I have learned. So, we have our first poem of this difficult time for her. She turns to birds and trees and her beloved pond, and something more. Always something more. For surely, such love, and such pain cannot be contained in poems or mere telling of the past. She yearns for something more, something new, just as long as it is something. It can be anywhere, just so there is peace and understanding, a way to fly towards the melding of self with love. If we could just lose ourselves totally, which we have already done greatly when a loved one dies, but long to do completely, we might just survive the loss and make sense of life's grandeur. It is difficult in our cultural context to come up with words that hold death, life, love, awe, wonder, loss, beauty, the ache of separation, and the ecstasy of interconnection. So why not God I say?

What is your Way? How do you get there?

After Her Death

I am trying to find the lesson for tomorrow.
Matthew something. Which lectionary?
I have not forgotten the Way, but a little,
the way to the Way.
the trees keep whispering peace, peace,
and the birds in the shallows are full of the
bodies of small fish and are content.
They open their wings so easily, and fly.
So. It is still possible.

I open the book
which the strange, difficult, beautiful church
has given me. To Matthew. Anywhere.

keywords: death, religion, peace, birds, fish, hunt, wings, fly, book, difficult, beautiful

Mary has lost her partner of many years I have learned. So, we have our first poem of this difficult time for her. She turns to birds and trees and her beloved pond, and something more. Always something more. For surely, such love, and such pain cannot be contained in poems or mere telling of the past. She yearns for something more, something new, just as long as it is something. It can be anywhere, just so there is peace and understanding, a way to fly towards the melding of self with love. If we could just lose ourselves totally, which we have already done greatly when a loved one dies, but long to do completely, we might just survive the loss and make sense of life's grandeur. It is difficult in our cultural context to come up with words that hold death, life, love, awe, wonder, loss, beauty, the ache of separation, and the ecstasy of interconnection. So why not God I say?

What is your Way? How do you get there?

Great Moth Comes From His Papery Cage - September 12, 2010

Gone is the worm, that tunnel body. Gone is the mouth

That loved leaves and tomatoes.

Gone are the innumerable feet.

He is beautiful now, and shivers into the air

As if he has always know how,

Who crawled and crawled, all summer,.

He has wide wings, with a flare at the bottom.

The moon excites him. The heat of the night excites him.

But, where did the dance come from?

Surely not out of a simple winter’s sleep.

Surely it’s more than ambition, this new architecture?

What could it be, that does it?

Let me look closer, and a long time, the next time

I see green-blooded worm crawling and curling

Hot day after hot day

Among the leaves and the smooth, proud tomatoes.

We have had a long, hot summer; record breaking in fact. That relentless heat, for which there seems no purpose, has been accompanied with a profusion of garden spiders around our home. Throughout the summer they have grown enormous. I mark my days by observing their webs, each time grown slightly larger in proportion to their bodies, and wonder how it is they “know” to build their webs. Where did this knowledge come from? I also wonder where will the spiders go to when fall finally breaks the wall of heat and humidity? Maybe the from and to location is the same. Spiders and knowledge, moths and tomatoes, humans and mice – in the watching and listening the source and our future unite and we can but dance in wonder.

Where does life come from and where are we going? Our breath unites us, no matter if we know the answer of source and future.

At Round Pond

owl

make your little appearance now

owl dark bird bird of gloom

messenger reminder

of death

that can't be stopped

argued with leashed put out

like a red fire but

burns as it will

owl

I have not seen you now for

too long a time don't

hide away but come flowing and clacking

the slap of your wings

your death's head oh rise

out of the thick and shaggy pines when you

look down with your

golden eyes how everything

trembles

then settles

from mere incidence into

the lush of meaning.

My father-in-law, Jerry, is visiting us now these weeks of late spring. He brought his binoculars and his presence in the moment, for he has lost most of his short term memory ability because of Alzheimer's. He won't remember what birds he has seen, but that hasn't stopped us from looking. He asked what were the "good birds" to see and I told him of the Barred Owl who comes to our clothesline every year to hunt, and of the Swallow-tailed Kites, one who just flew over our yard a few days back. The Owl though has not returned and I wonder if he has died, for surely he would not forget us or the great hunting in our mostly uncut lawn.

Yesterday I took Jerry to our congregation that has a Sunday morning bird walk. I asked our most impressive bird leader, Caleb Gordon, if the Barred Owl had been seen lately on the grounds and he said, not so much. But that didn't keep us from looking. Towards the end of the walk the owl came in silently to the oak trees above us. The owl looked down on us and I wondered what meaning there is in the gaze the owl exchanged with us if the memory is to be immediately erased as in the case of Alzheimer's or in the case of too busy schedules that move from one incident to the next. Maybe we can't hold onto memories, but that doesn't mean that we don't look for meaning and interconnection in our days and offer what we experience to those who accompany us on our walk through life. So every day I tell Jerry about the owl, and the Swallow-tailed Kite he saw later that same day, show him pictures of them, and we find satisfaction in these moments of interconnection with one another. So maybe my owl won't come back this year and Jerry won't remember him even if he did, but for this moment, I can hold onto the grace of having family with us, now, if not always into the future. Owl of life, owl of death, our whole lives.

What do owls mean to you?

Seven White Butterflies

Seven white butterflies

delicate in a hurry look

how they bang the pages

of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow

and orange and plain

gold all eternity

is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such

wisdom in the agitated

motions of the mind seven

dancers floating

even as worms toward

paradise see how they banter

and riot and rise

to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into

the invisible wind weightless

lacy willing

to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles

down on a yellow thumb on a

grassy stem now

all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden towers who

would have thought it could be so easy?

What is the "it" that is so easy? I think perhaps the it is we, the beings of thoughts and agitated minds, worming ourselves towards paradise. What if instead of saying "this sucks" as the tag line of day to day living, we said instead, "How easy it is to love." We evolved to love and to give ourselves over to a better thing, to the universe. Our ivory towers of learning are not so different from the golden towers of summer's flowerful yield - sipping the nectar of the gods, of interconnection, of love.

I was recently reminded how easy it is to love. In fact, I was surprised. I have been watching a Desert Tortoise out my window all spring. She is digging a rather big hole in the middle of the yard and in between my writing and studying, I pause to glance at her digging and her sentinel like ways above her burrow. My spouse came home two evenings ago and said upon entering the house, "Is there a veterinarian in the house?" When I hear that I know that some animal has been injured or is sick. He led me unto the beginning of our driveway where we looked down on a tortoise who had obviously been crushed by a car that belongs to our household. I in turn was crushed. I turned the tortoise over - it was a female of about the same size as my friend of the back yard - and had died some time during the day. The rest of the day I kept looking at the tortoise burrow out back and not seeing "my" tortoise, I lapsed into tears and grief. Who knew I loved her so dearly? The next day though there she was, guarding her turf. So it was another that had died, no less lovely or loveable than the one I knew. How easy it is to love a tortoise. How easy it is to love each child of the universe.

How easy is it for you to love?

Wings

My dog came through the pinewoods dragging a dead fox-ribs and a spine, and a tail with the fur still on it. Where did you find it? I said to her, and she showed me. And there was the skull, there were the leg bones and the shoulder blades.

I took them home. I scrubbed them and put them on a shelf to look at-the pelvis, and the snowy helmet. Sometimes in the pines, in the starlight an owl hunches in the dense needles, and coughs up his pellet- the vole or the mouse recently eaten. The pellets fall through the branches, through the hair of the grass. Dark flowers of fur, with a salt of bones and teeth, melting away.

In Washington, inside the building of glass and stone, and down the long aisles, and deep inside the drawers, are the bones of women and children, the bones of old warriors. Whole skeletons and parts of skeletons. They can't move. They can't even shiver. Mute, catalogues-they lie in the wide drawers.

So it didn't take long. I could see how it was, and where I was headed. I took what was left of the fox back to the pinewoods and buried it. I don't even remember where. I do remember, though, how I felt. If I had wings I would have opened them. I would have risen from the ground.

Surprised again by Mary this pre-sunrise moment. I would not have thought that a poem entitled "Wings" would hold so much that was not about birds alone, but about all of us. Is there somewhere in facing death the winds that will rise us up on wings of hope? If we face who we are, that we maim and hunt, even our own kind, we can find liberation: here in the morning resurrection, in the burying of bones of the past, in this moment of reconciliation? I cannot undo what I have done yesterday, but I may face who I am today, who we are today, who this earth is, and may, I pray, it only take 3 days and not 2000 + years, or even the centuries span since we invaded the native lands.

Where do you hold close, or not "see how it is" the bones of the past?

Landscape - March 29, 2010

Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that

they have no tongues, could lecture

all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn't it clear

the black oaks along the path are standing

as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

...if the doors of my heart

ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now

the crows break off from the rest of the darkness

and burst up into the sky-as though

all night they had thought of what they would like

their lives to be, and imagined

their strong, thick wings.

The sun is not yet up. There is time still in the darkness to imagine who I already am: frail, small, patient, strong, tall. My heart opens to what I am and so this too opens the way for what I would like my life to be. This morning, so far, I'm alive, touching the earth as moss and reaching for the sky as oak and crow. May I every time I see the laurel oak strung with Spanish Moss and alive with black ruckus, imagine who I am, even if it is the boy in Jakarta that Mary tells us about tomorrow.

Who do you imagine yourself to be? Who are you already?

Hattie Bloom - January 13, 2010

...That love, which made my gentle uncle wild,

Might also change a painted girl to gold.

The dream that smiled and trailed it's silken wing

Was what my uncle grieved for; and I thought

The truth of love was that in truth, for him,

Lost Hattie Bloom became that perfect thing.

I am also reading a Rumi (Sufi poet) poem a day, and I smile in seeing that Mary and Rumi merge in union today, nearly undifferentiated except by about 700 years. The poetry of Mary I suspect might be recited one day as millions memorize Rumi, though Mary's messages of love alchemy for the soul are not as direct as Rumi, Hafiz, and other poets of this tradition. Rumi used images of camels, wine, emeralds, and mirrors while Mary uses bird and tree. Both though speak of grief, loneliness, and the gift that life is. If we could but only accept loss and death we might see our perfection in both silken and broken wing.

Has love ever grown stronger for you after you lost the stimulus for that great desire?