After I fall Down the Stairs at the Golden Temple

For a while I could not remember some word

I was in need of,

and I was bereaved and said: where are you,

beloved friend?

Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, India.

This is Mary's latest book after all, so I'm guessing she is speaking of age and losing words and the mind turns mushy.  So is she losing the medium of her art?

Aren't we all?

Are we always falling down in gracious awe of the sun bathed earth - the golden temple?  What if aging, decay, illness, were one large prayer to earth?

We were born to be bereft of the beloved, but the temple is always there - our bodies, earth bodies, one body!

So today let me fling my words away from me, my health, my walking, and let them tumble down the Maya temple, headless, without thought. Just heart and bones.

Oh yes, they may eat my heart too.

Depiction of Maya Sacrifice from Film Apocalypto

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?

How Many Days

How many days I lived and had never used

the holy words.

Tenderly I began them when it came to me

to want to, oh mystery irrefutable!

Then I went out of that place

and into a field and lay down

among the weeds and the grasses,

whispering to them, fast, in order to keep

that world also.

I have been on leave from my home congregation as I shift from parish ministry to my community multispecies ministry.  I don't know how many days exactly it has been since I was part of the Sunday morning ritual, but it will have been nearly a year by the time I return.  Yet I wonder if I have ever left.

Aren't we in this blog exchanging holy words?

And what about the red-winged blackbirds by the sinkhole  who squealed at me yesterday so that I wouldn't miss their fine red epaulets? 

And the red-shouldered hawks who coupled on the telephone pole during last week's morning walk?  He flew off, I hope satisfied. She remained, all fluffed and still, unashamedly content.

Their world is our world.  May we treat it holy, to keep it whole.

How do you keep the world whole? Yourself whole?

Imagine

I don't care for adjectives, yet the world fills me with them.

And even beyond what I see, I imagine more.

Seeing, for example, with understanding,

or with acceptance and humility and

without understanding,

into the heart of the bristly, locked-in worm

just as it's becoming what we call the luna,

that green tissue-winged, strange, graceful,

fluttering thing.

Will death allow such transportation of the eye?...

Well, we will all find out, each of us.

And what would we be, beyond the yardstick,

beyond supper and dollars,

if we were not filled with such wondering?

To be human, is to wonder what waits for us in death.

Is it uber-human to wait patiently for what is developing into life, or decaying into death?

To see without seeing?

I see for instance, without understanding the behavior of myself and those around me.  We're a despicable lot, aren't we?  Bristly worms, locked into our narrow outlooks and self interests.

Then, when grace comes upon me, I see the beauty within.  I still don't understand.

So what is left to do?

Ah, yes.

Look

Laugh

Bow in humility

I wonder what you ponder?

Meeting Wolf

There are no words

inside his mouth,

inside his golden eyes.

So we stand, silent,

both of us tense

under the speechless but faithful trees.

And this is what I think:

I have given him

intrusion.

He has given me

a glimpse into a better but now broken world.

Not his doing, but ours.

I can hear my spouse speaking in my mind now, for over the last few days we have spoken about "needs based ethics."  This ethical process doesn't have principles, or categories of people., therefore there isn't blame or praise.  For example,  "animals have the same rights as human animals,"  Ethical principles are one framework for guiding our behavior, but in reality our modular brains, our emotional limbic system, and our other subconscious motivations for behavior influence our actions more than any cognitive framework. 

You might ask then that with such wild brains as ours and without judgment of what is moral, how do we heal the world and stop the harming and breaking?

In Needs Based Ethics (NBE) what we do is integrate our mind's conscious and subconscious functions by keeping our hearts open to the needs of all beings.  It is an ethic of com-passion in that we bring our feelings to the situation of ourselves and others so that we can empathize with others' needs. These needs aren't desires or strategies, but are universal and fundamental to the species in question.

So as in my reflection yesterday, we humans are not more "right" or "wrong" than the wolf, squirrel, or owl.  We do things to fulfill life and the basic needs of protection, security, connection, and creativity.  It's just that the strategy that we pick to meet these life fulfilling needs have tragic consequences. 

My tenets of the day:

We break relationships, bodies, and the earth.

We must meet the wolf our self-interests and mourn our choices.

We are not an intrusion upon the earth, but one of many beautiful beings.

We are worthy and so are others.

May my actions so reflect these understandings.

What are your tenets today?

I Want to Write Something So Simply

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.

I think that Mary can check this off her list of accomplishments. She does write so simply that it feels as if I am with her as she walks with Percy along the shore or meanders through a meadow marveling at the flowers.  Of course, in her very writing she distinguishes herself from all others. The words themselves, captured permanently in time say "I" and "you."  It is up to the reader then to deconstruct what is written so we can hear "Thou" and "We" instead. After a year's rising with Mary I believe that my neural circuitry as rewired to do this translation work when I pick up a book of her poems, see the road kill, or write her to you in this blog.  We are all love and pain, life and death, and it's all good.

                

What and how can you write simply about today?

Who Said This

Something whispered something

that was not even a word.

It was more like a silence

that was understandable.

I was standing

at the edge of the pond.

Nothing living, what we call living,

was in sight.

And yet, the voice entered me,

my body-life,

with so much happiness.

And there was nothing there

but the water, the sky, the grass.

Once when on a plane traveling back from conservation work in Guatemala, a voice entered me.  I had been spending all morning out tramping through the grass of cow pastures, climbing, protecting, and loving parrots and their nest trees.  The final nest inspected before I sped to the capital city to board the plane contained two chicks whose parents had died or abandoned the nest. They were hungry and thin, and were bound to die if we did not intervene.  They were much in my heart as I sat on the plane reading my veterinary journals.   The voice spoke my name, "Kim" and continued to call out to me. I never did discover who said the word, but I had gotten up and inspected every inch of the cabin and there was no one there whom I knew.  I suspect though that the voice was someone I knew, my inner wisdom which is the love of earth and all her beings. The voice told me to move to Guatemala and at first I refused. But by the end of the conversation I relented, and such an overwhelming since of love came to me and staid for many months. In that moment I knew that there was nothing more important than love.  There was nothing else there in my life that mattered, except the expression of love. This moment of "awakes on a plane" altered my body-life and has directed me sometimes in no more than a whisper over the nearly 20 years since. 

What voice has come to you to tell you of wisdom?  Has it whispered, laughed, or screamed?

Walking Home from Oak-Head

There is something
about the snow-laden sky
in winter
in the late afternoon

that brings to the heart elation
and the lovely meaninglessness
of time.
Whenever I get home - whenever -

somebody loves me there.
Meanwhile
I stand in the same dark peace
as any pine tree,

or wander on slowly
like the still unhurried wind,
waiting,
as for a gift,

for the snow to begin
which it does
at first casually,
then, irrepressibly.

Wherever else I live -
in music, in words,
in the fires of the heart,
I abide just as deeply

in this nameless, indivisible place,
this world,
which is falling apart now,
which is white and wild,

which is faithful beyond all our expressions of faith,
our deepest prayers.
Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I'll stand in the doorway
stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
my shoulders
covered with stars.

keywords: snow, sky, winter, time love, dark, peace, tree, wind, gift, music, word, fire, heart, world, star

I have been told that in this book we see a shift of Mary, perhaps towards religion or God. I'm not quite clear what discontent exactly some of my acquaintances portend when they say "Mary changes" in her later books. It's hard for me to imagine that she could be much more religious, much more of the suffering seeker, or more the one totally committed to growing her faith in the world than she has been. I certainly know that she brings out the hunger in me for faith in earth and her beings. Just beyond her words and often beyond my reach is the nameless, the indivisible, to which she temporarily gives the names of tree or bird. Maybe later she'll take the risk and call this God. It's all the same to me, for my struggle will not change. With this world falling apart now, how might I still see the light and grow a faith that is ultimately beyond me. For me, part of this answer is becoming, read a poem from Mary.

You who read Mary regularly, what is happening with your faith and in your prayers?

The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First

The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted, rode the wind. Its eye at this distance looked like green glass; its feet were the color of butter. Speed obvious-ly, was joy. But then, so was the sudden, slow circle it carved into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring of its shoulders, and the pulling into itself the long, sharp-edge wings, and the fall into the grass where it tussled a moment, like a bundle of brown leaves, and then, again, lifted itself into the air, that butter-color clenched in order to hold a small a small, still body, and it flew off as my mind sang out oh all that loose, blue rink of sky, where does it go to, and why?

Mary, are you trying to write yourself out of a job? Who needs poets if we just offer up to the world our attention? Indeed! Who needs ministesr, monks, priests, counselors, new age therapists, or even God? We have hawks, mice, the hunters and the hunted – all of reality is there for our grasping as we touch the earth and reach for the sky.

What job would you lose if others paid attention?

White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

I wonder what it is that I will accomplish today

If anything can be called that marvelous word.

It won’t be

My kind of work, which is only putting words on a page,

The pencil

Haltingly calling up

The light of the world,

Yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright

As the mockingbird’s verbal hilarity

In the still unleafed shrub in the churchyard-

Or the white heron rising over the swamp and the darkness,

His yellow eyes and broad wings wearing

The light of the world in the light of the world-

Ah yes, I see him.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Okay, I’m flat out disagreeing with Mary, although given the paradoxical nature of poems; she probably secretly led me into agreeing with her. I do believe that the poem on the paper is the light of the world as is the poet. The heron over the swamp is no more beautiful than the humans I saw in the hydrotherapy pool this morning. I’m at a resort/convention hotel in San Diego and after working out I limped over to the Jacuzzi to lessen the ache of my knee. In one corner of the Jacuzzi is a middle aged woman, her body bulging out of her suit. In another corner is an older man, he too rotund and big bandage covering a third of his face. I can go into judgment mind and ask what is right about we well-fed middle aged people relaxing in the middle of the day in an expensive hotel while billions upon billions of other beings are suffering? How is the work we putter with considered any kind of accomplishment amidst the beauty and tragedy that rises out of the ache of our hearts and the bodies of so many? I don’t rightly know how to answer this except to say that my inner knowing replies to the doubting mind that beauty is in all bodies and all words. And that means mine too.

What is it you hope to accomplish today, and is it enough?

Mysteries, Four of the Simple Ones

How does the seed-grain feel

When it is just beginning to be wheat?

And how does the catbird feel

When the blue eggs break and become little catbirds?

Maybe on midsummer night’s eve,

And without fanfare?

And how does the turtle feel as she covers her eggs

With the sweep of her feet

Then leaves them for the world to take care of?

Does she know her accomplishment?

And when the blue heron, beaking his long breast feathers,

Sees one feather fall, does he know I will find it?

Will he see me holding it in my hand

As he opens his wings

Softly and without a sound-

As he rises and floats over the water?

And this is just any day at the edge of the pond,

A black and leafy pond without a name

Until I named it.

And what else can we do when the mysteries present themselves

But hope to pluck from the basket the brisk words

That will applaud them,

The heron, the turtle, the catbird, the seed-grain

Kneeling in the dark earth, its body

Opening into the golden world?

Mary has gotten into me. Does she know her accomplishment? Yesterday I spent all day in a conference center, and when evening came a group of us went along the San Diego bay front in search of our restaurant. As we walked I looked over the heads of the crowds onto the water, jammed with boats, and longed for my north Florida springs where I might be held in oneness and peace for a while. Homesickness I suppose, or spring sickness, or for Mary, pond sickness – I wanted to be home. Then this morning, oh so very early by Pacific Coast time, the sun a long way from showing me a golden world, I lay in my bed thinking of the springs and home. And of course I was there – the hotel air swirling around me held me in oneness and peace for a while. The litter dropped on last night’s sidewalk by a street vendor not so very different from the heron’s gifted feather. Reading Mary’s poems it seems that I open more to this world, my only accomplishment this day to kneel in the earth, or on the sidewalk, or the hotel fitness floor, and give word form to the mystery of grateful praise happening in me with you, reader and companion.

How do you name the mysteries in your life, both the grand and the nearly imperceptible?

Little Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond

As for life,

I’m humbled,

I’m without words

Sufficient to say

How it has been hard as flint,

And soft as a spring pond,

Both of these

And over and over

And long pale afternoons besides,

And so many mysteries

Beautiful as eggs in a nest,

Still unhatched

Though warm and watched over

By something I have never seen-

A tree angel, perhaps,

Or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world

To be dazzled, then to be reflective.

It suffices, it is all comfort-

Along with human love,

Dog love, water love, little-serpent love,

Sunburst love, or love for the smallest of birds

Flying among the scarlet flowers.

There is hardly time to think about

Stopping, and lying down at last

To the long afterlife, to the tenderness

Yet to come, when

Time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever

And we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.

As for death,

I can’t wait to be the hummingbird,

Can you?

I awake today in Edmonton Canada, attending the International Congress of Conservation Biology. Last night I arrived to streets thronged with pedestrians on their way to see the firework display that began at 11 p.m. (the sun sets very late this far north). The day was Canada Day, similar to the U.S.A.’s July 4^th celebration. This day, 143 years ago, Canada became Canada. Such a huge celebration it was to celebrate difference, distinction, and tribal affinity. I bristle with emphasis on nationalism, however is Canada love like USA love, like Africa love, like Iraq love? Are we already each of us everyone else? So if I smile at waving white and red flags with the Canadian maple leaf on it, is it not the same as my dazzlement at hummingbird and flower? I can’t wait for the world to be in awareness of this wondrous internconnection, but wait, aren’t you already? I don’t want to pretend that it takes physical death to become you, I’m ready now to die to the false believe that we aren’t bonded in love. Francis David, a 16^th century Unitarian theologian in Transylvania said, “we need not think alike to love alike.” And we need not swim, crawl, hop, fish, hatch, or die alike to love alike, or to be loved alike.

What’s keeping us from seeing the love that bonds and binds us to one another

The Dipper

The Dipper

Once I saw

in a quick-falling, white-veined stream,

among the leafed islands of the wet rocks,

a small bird, and knew it

from the pages of a book; it was

the dipper, and dipping he was,

as well as, sometimes, on a rock-peak, starting up

the clear, strong pipe of his voice; at this,

there being no words to transcribe, I had to

bend forward, as it were,

into his frame of mind, catching

everything I could in the tone,

cadence, sweetness, and briskness

of his affirmative report.

Though not by words, it was

a more than satisfactory way to the

bridge of understanding. This happened

in Colorado

more than half a century ago-

more, certainly, than half my lifetime ago-

and, just as certainly, he has been sleeping for decades

in the leaves beside the stream,

his crumble of white bones, his curl of flesh

comfortable even so.

And still I hear him-

And whenever I open the ponderous book of riddles

He sits with his black feel hooked to the page,

His eyes cheerful, still burning with water-love-

And thus the world is full of leaves and feathers,

And comfort, and instruction. I do not even remember

Your name, great river,

Since that hour I have lived

simply,

in the joy of the body as full and clear

as falling water; the pleasures of the mind

like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.

I saw a dipper once high in the mountains of California. I was on a field trip for my class in Ornithology at the University of California, Davis. We students visited a field station that had an underground room with a clear glass plate that formed one bank of a mountain stream . We got to observe fish, insects, and the dipper bird that came swimming by with her furtive wings flapping, showing us all how to fly underground, underwater, and overwhelmed in beauty. We spent that day marveling at birds and writing field notes about them. Returning to university grounds, we had a test about what we were learning about birds. We answered life’s questions concerning awe and interconnection in terms of ecological description and anatomical terms. Perhaps I was compelled to study hard for that class because like Mary, the dipper was perched on my field notebook, examining and encouraging my studious presence to the beauty around me. This was the only college level class where I procured not just an “A” but an “A+.” Really though, the excellence goes to the dipper, who allows me to delve deep into my faith and gratitude in interconnecting being, and thus touch joy.

What brings you joy, simply?