New Year’s Day—

everything is in blossom!

I feel about average.

--Issa

Rain, New Year's Eve

The rain is a broken piano,

playing the same note over and over.

My five-year-old said that.

Already she knows loving the world

means loving the wobbles

you can't shim, the creaks you can't

oil silent--the jerry-rigged parts, 

MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

Let me love the cold rain's plinking.

Let me love the world the way I love

my young son, not only when 

he cups my face in his sticky hands,

but when, roughhousing, 

he accidentally splits my lip.

Let me love the world like a mother.

Let me be tender when it lets me down.

Let me listen to the rain's one note

and hear a beginner's song.

--Maggie Smith

The winter of listening

No one but me by the fire,

my hands burning

red in the palms while

the night wind carries

everything away outside.

All this petty worry

while the great cloak

of the sky grows dark

and intense

round every living thing.

All this trying 

to know

who we are

and all this

wanting to know

exactly

what we must do.

What is precious

inside us does not

care to be known by the mind

in ways that diminish

its presence.

What we strive for

in perfection

is not what turns us

to the lit angel

we desire.

What disturbs

and then nourishes

has everything

we need.

What we hate

in ourselves

is what we cannot know

in ourselves but

what is true 

to the pattern

does not need

to be explained.

Inside everyone

is a great shout of joy

waiting to be born…

From ‘The Winter of Listening’

David Whyte : Essentials

Many Rivers Press 2019

 “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

― Melody Beattie

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

- Wendell Berry

"There is a structural lovelessness and powerlessness to the political events of our time. It is easy to feel despair, to want to lose hope. I write - not to tell you to keep hope alive, but to invite you to lean in further to listen to the nuances of your discomfort. In the new year, in the new decade, remember this:

Your discomfort is a holy ally, a redeeming interruption. Where you are most confused, exhausted, distressed and compromised, is where the wild things grow. Where crazy colours, beguiling angels' trumpets, decadent air ferns and wise old spruces sprout with festive abandon. Where the thrumming of frogs, the discourse of cricket limbs, the ambivalence of a nightly mist, and the audience of a delighted moon contrive an unheard score. It's where your primal self, where the unthought, calls to you softly - reminding you that you are not to be easily resolved..."

--Adebayo C. Akomolafe

Empty-handed I entered the world. 

Barefoot I leave it. 

My coming, my going- 

Two simple happenings 

That got entangled.

― Kozan Ichikyo

when the dawn 

is still almost dark

I rise restless

watch the 

morning come

sly slow

movement into light

from shadow play

an unveiling

inside this dark heart

a yearning to live

as nature lives

surrendering all

--bell hooks, from Appalachian Elegy

The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies.

--bell hooks

When you meet someone deep in grief

Slip off your needs

and set them by the door.

Enter barefoot 

this darkened chapel

hollowed by loss

hallowed by sorrow

its gray stone walls

and floor.

You, congregation of one

are here to listen

not to sing.

Kneel in the back pew.

Make no sound.

Let the candles speak.

--Patricia Runkle

The Heart's Counting Knows Only One

In Sung China

two monks

friends for sixty years

watched the geese pass.

Where are they going?

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship

in the koan-books of insight.

No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,

standing, perplexed by sadness,

goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,

but not yet.

As the barely audible

geese are not yet swallowed;

as even we, my love. will not entirely be lost.

--Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.... In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.... We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.... Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

~Viktor E. Frankl

Oh Children

Oh children, will you grow up in a world without birds?

Will there be crickets where you are?

Will there be asters?

Clams, at a minimum?

Maybe not clams.

We know there will be waves.

Not much needed for those.

A breeze, a blow, a cyclone.

Ripples as well.

Stones.

Stones are consoling.

There will be sunsets as long as there is dust.

There will be dust.

Oh children, will you grow up in a world without songs?

Without pines?

Without mosses?

Will you spend your life in a cave?

A sealed cave with an oxygen line, until there's a failure?

Will your eyes blank out like the white eyes of sunless fish?

In there, what will you wish for?

Oh children, will you grow up in a world without ice?

Without mice?

Without lichens?

Oh children, will you grow up?

- Margaret Atwood

Prayer for the morning

Did you rise this morning,

broken and hung over

with weariness and pain

and rage tattered from waving too long in a brutal wind?

Get up, child.

Pull your bones upright

gather your skin and muscle into a patch of sun.

Draw breath deep into your lungs;

you will need it

for another day calls to you.

I know you ache.

I know you wish the work were done

and you

with everyone you have ever loved

were on a distant shore

safe, and unafraid.

But remember this,

tired as you are:

you are not alone.

Here

and here

and here also

there are others weeping

and rising

and gathering their courage.

You belong to them

and they to you

and together,

we will break through

and bend the arc of justice

all the way down

into our lives.

--Audette Fulbright Fulson

Messenger

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—

          equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me

          keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be

          astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

          and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

          to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is

          that we live forever.

--Mary Oliver

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow

Francis Weller