For When People Ask

I want a word that means

   okay and not okay,

  a word that means

devastated and stunned with joy.

   I want the word that says

  I feel it all all at once.

The heart is not like a songbird

   singing only one note at a time,

  more like a Tuvan throat singer

able to sing both a drone

   and simultaneously

  two or three harmonics high above it—

a sound, the Tuvans say,

   that gives the impression

  of wind swirling among rocks.

The heart understands the swirl,

   how the churning of opposite feelings

  weaves through us like an insistent breeze

leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,

   blesses us with paradox

  so we might walk more openly

into this world so rife with devastation,

   this world so ripe with joy.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (A Hundred Falling Veils)

 Generosity means giving, making sacrifices. It's something that people have been doing since who-knows-when. If we were to stop being generous or to stop making sacrifices for one another, the world wouldn't be able to last as a world  -  because even animals are generous with one another, just like human beings. They share their food with one another just like we do. They live together and eat together, feeding their offspring and caring for them. Take ants, for example: Each one helps carry food back to the nest. Other animals take food back to their hole or their hollow in a tree and eat it together.

We human beings live in families, in social situations. To the extent that we are involved with others, to the extent we make sacrifices for one another, beginning with the sacrifices that parents make for their children and continuing with those that we make for society at large. We live together by being generous, by making sacrifices for one another. Our hearts and our lives depend on one another, which is why we need to do this.

(Ajahn Maha Boowa)

Cherry Tomatoes

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,

breathless heat.

I sit on the ground

in the garden of Carmel,

picking ripe cherry tomatoes

and eating them.

They are so ripe that the skin is split,

so warm and sweet

from the attentions of the sun,

the juice bursts in my mouth,

an ecstatic taste,

and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,

sloshing in the saliva of August.

Hummingbirds halo me there,

in the great green silence,

and my own bursting heart

splits me with life.

--Anne Higgins

From  At the Year's Elbow.

There Is Another Way

There is another way to enter an apple:

a worm’s way.

The small, round door

closes behind her. The world

and all its necessities

ripen around her like a room.

In the sweet marrow of a bone,

the maggot does not remember

the wingspread

of the mother, the green

shine of her body, nor even

the last breath of the dying deer.

I, too, have forgotten

how I came here, breathing

this sweet wind, drinking rain,

encased by the limits

of what I can imagine

and by a husk of stars.

--Pat Schneider

 “Self-love is not just about constantly giving yourself praise and telling yourself how awesome you are. It’s about loving the real you, the human you - the person who has feet of clay, who comes undone under criticism, who sometimes fails and disappoints others. It’s about making a commitment to yourself that you will stick by yourself - even if no one else does. That’s what I mean when I say you must love yourself as though your life depends on it, because quite simply, I know without a doubt that it does.”

~Anita Moorjani

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before.

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message

Larger than anything you've ever heard,

Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,

Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose

Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers

A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about

To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's

Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

--Robert Bly

Blackbirds

I am 52 years old, and have spent

truly the better part

of my life out-of-doors

but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head

a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air

and when I turned my face upward

I saw a flock of blackbirds

rounding a curve I didn’t know was there

and the sound was simply all those wings

just feathers against air, against gravity

and such a beautiful winning

the whole flock taking a long, wide turn

as if of one body and one mind.

How do they do that?

Oh if we lived only in human society

with its cruelty and fear

its apathy and exhaustion

what a puny existence that would be

but instead we live and move and have our being

here, in this curving and soaring world

so that when, every now and then,

mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives

and when, even more rarely,

we manage to unite and move together

toward a common good,

and can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it’s meant to be.

-- Julie Cadwallader Staub

 To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. - Emily Dickinson

On Meditating, Sort Of

Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished

if you entertain a certain strict posture.

Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.

So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that

even better place — half asleep — where the world,

spring, summer, autumn, winter —

flies through my mind in its

hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time

reveal their true attitudes: they never

heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

Of course I wake up finally

thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,

made out of earth and water,

my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —

all that glorious, temporary stuff.

-- Mary Oliver (From Blue Horses)

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

- Mary Oliver

In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, 

I must listen to the birds

and in order to hear the birds

the warplanes must be silent

--Marwan Makhoul

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us,

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

"For the Children" by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island. © New Directions, 1974.

The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates not by building, but by hacking away.

--Alan Watts

The Quiet Listeners

Go into the woods

and tell your story

to the trees.

They are wise

standing in their folds of silence

among white crystals of rock

and dying limbs.

And they have time.

Time for the swaying of leaves,

the floating down,

the dust.

They have time for gathering

and holding the earth about their feet.

Do this.

It is something I have learned.

How they will bend down to you

so softly.

They will bend down to you

and listen.

--Laura Davies Foley

 Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention. 

Be astonished. 

Tell about it.

-Mary Oliver

Earthside

We are asked to arrive here, earthside,

To occupy every inch of the body we’re given,

To learn its language, its needs and gifts.

We are asked to use it as a compass

To harbour us in safety

And lead us through the wild.

We are asked to care for this place,

With the grit and grace of dirt on our hands.

We are asked to speak,

To give voice to the voiceless

And translate light to language,

To cast the widest net,

To include everything inside of it,

To crack the heart wide open

And never close it again.

When we are pulled apart by longing,

We are asked to keep showing up,

To follow this soft, insistent tether:

To become what we love,

To pour ourselves into the hands of the ancestors,

To be held by them like water,

To quench the mouths of our children,

To nourish them with who we become.

We are asked to belong, finally

To ourselves, to each other, to the land,

To our own shapeshifting shadows,

To our own threadbare, indelible light.

We are asked to belong to the old tales that brought us here

And to the new ones that will keep us alive,

We are asked to belong to the Great Turning Wave

Of this time and this place.

We are asked to punctuate our breath

with both sorrow & praise

We are asked to answer by becoming

Again and again the way.

--Emily Kedar