every night before I go to sleep

I invite all of my beloveds who have 

died to join me around my bed to

sing with me.

when I was younger 

the attendance was sparse 

it was like a barbershop quartet 

of a few deceased loved ones and me 

squeaking out a few

sweet improvised tunes

about the miracles of

this life and afterlife 

in the echo chamber of

my quieting heart 

but the older I get

the more crowded my 

bedroom has gotten 

and the louder the singing 

has become. 

lately some of my beloveds

are even bringing their instruments

to play around my bed. 

it’s not a seance 

it’s a symphony. 

there are so 

many beloveds

showing up to

help me compose 

that I’ve had to ask

them to stand close 

to each other.  

now, at bedtime 

my bedroom has become 

a bustling concert hall. 

some nights we play

the rock and roll of 

gratitude

and some nights we all

hold violins and 

play songs about

the energy of love

that radiates out

of the beating heart

of the universe. 

some nights we play the jazz

of how wonderfully terrifying it 

can be to give our hearts   

to each other. 

some nights we 

sing a capella. 

some nights 

we just hum.

it doesn’t really matter 

what style we play 

because, with every chord

this community of 

beloved ghosts and

I create together, 

the less afraid of death I become.

as it turns out

this adventure we 

are all on together 

is all music

and the beat goes on and on and on

~ john roedel

To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.

—Audre Lorde

Sometimes people can get tense about ‘enlightenment’, and that brings up worries, pressure, and all kinds of views; but often what we really need is to feel welcomed and blessed. This is quite a turnaround from our normal mind-set; but when we are sitting somewhere where we feel trusted, where there’s benevolence around us, we can let ourselves open up. And as we open our hearts, we can sense a clarity of presence, and firm up around that. This firmness arising from gentleness is what the Buddha-image stands for. It reminds us that there was an historical Buddha whose awakening is still glowing through the ages – but when this is also presented as a heart-impression in the here and now, rather than as a piece of history, it carries more resonance. Then the image serves as a direct impression of what bright kamma feels like.

--Ajahn Sucitto

Flare

Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.

It is not the sunrise,

which is a red rinse,

which is flaring all over the eastern sky;

it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;

it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,

or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;

it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,

will go on sizzling and clapping

from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,

that are billowing and shining,

that are shaking in the wind...

The poem is not the world.

It isn't even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.

It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,

like the door of a little temple,

so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,

and less yourself than part of everything.

--Mary Oliver

Another Country

I love these raw moist dawns with

a thousand birds you hear but can't

quite see in the mist.

My old alien body is a foreigner

struggling to get into another country.

The loon call makes me shiver.

Back at the cabin I see a book

and am not quite sure what that is.

--Jim Harrison (2016)

Secondhand Joy

Maybe someday we’ll find a way

to reuse the happiness that others

have refused or given away, claiming

they were too busy to tend to it.

How lucky to find someone else’s

secondhand joy hanging from a rack

at the Goodwill for just a dollar,

and what a deal: Feel how it 

shimmers in your hands, unloved,

unworn, the tags still dangling

from each empty sleeve.

--James Crews

On a Day When Stillness Seems Possible

and the river is a long white stroke

of roiling and continuous surge,

and the grass, gone to seed,

wavers in the wind, then stills,

wavers, then stills, and the swallows

spiral, the leaf shadows spangle

and the ants braid a path

across the stones.

But I rhyme today with the cottonwood trunks,

my own body unmoving in the breeze.

It feels good in this moment

to be more tree than cloud,

more silence than song.

So easily, the stillness opens me,

softens me. How simple, really,

to do nothing. How is it I so often resist?

If there is no in me now, I do not notice it.

Stillness has made a home in me

and there seems to be nothing

the stillness refuses. Come,

it seems to say. There is room here

for everything. It opens me wider.

The world rushes in.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

 

Be Kind

Not merely because Henry James said

there were but four rules of life—

be kind be kind be kind be kind—but

because it’s good for the soul, and,

what’s more, for others; it may be

that kindness is our best audition

for a worthier world, and, despite

the vagueness and uncertainty of

its recompense, a bird may yet wander

into a bush before our very houses,

gratitude may not manifest itself in deeds

entirely equal to our own, still there’s

weather arriving from every direction,

the feasts of famine and feasts of plenty

may yet prove to be one, so why not

allow the little sacrificial squinches and

squigulas to prevail? Why not inundate

the particular world with minute particulars?

Dust’s certainly all our fate, so why not

make it the happiest possible dust,

a detritus of blessedness? Surely

the hedgehog, furling and unfurling

into its spiked little ball, knows something

that, with gentle touch and unthreatening

tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked

witches of our childhood have died and,

from where they are buried, a great kindness

has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course,

in the end so much comes down to privilege

and its various penumbras, but too much

of our unruly animus has already been

wasted on reprisals, too much of the

unblessed air is filled with smoke from

undignified fires. Oh friends, take

whatever kindness you can find

and be profligate in its expenditure:

It will not drain your limited resources,

I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable

and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws

to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,

and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.

--Michael Blumenthal

From No Hurry.

Country of Water

I know who I am because I believe it

The breath in my chest

Insistent in its choice

The skin that I’m in

The bones and blood and veins

It carries like a promise

       Have you witnessed the ocean

Moving with so much gust and life

Have you witnessed the river

Still waters bubbling the rebirth of school

       Have you witnessed your body

Its own country of water

Moving against the tide of a world

So heartbreaking     it’s forgotten its own voice

Be still friend

Be still

Be kind to yourself in the gift of stillness

I know who I am because I believe it

I know

I know 

Who I

Who I

Believe

Believe

Believe

In three’s we will come

A drip of water moving against a boulder

Water slow and steady can turn rock

Into a pebble

Like anxiety

Life self-doubt

Smaller

Smaller

Until gone

Let your love for yourself be the water

Be the rise

Be the mist

Let you be

I know who I am because I believe it

I believe I am my mother’s daughter

I believe I am my grandmother’s prayers

I believe I am my great-grandmother’s backbone revealed

I am I am because I believe so

I am because a woman believed in me

What a continent I became

What a country of water I be

I flow and fluid and rise and ebb and I believe in me

         I am not wrong

I am wronged

In this skin I’ve reclaimed

From this trap of this country’s tourniquet

Only to find the sweet solace is a river bed

Its mud beckons me closer to its silt

Small fish and forgotten glass unearth themselves

Like baby teeth

Only one can cut into flesh purposely

Only one does not know what it is capable of

I believe in the air as much as I believe in the fire

I believe in the fire as much as the water consumes

I believe in a higher source

Energetic and wise

I believe in my ability to thrive

This body

       This body is a good thing

Turning two miles walked over a bridge into a family’s meal

Creating poems that become cashier’s checks

Dentist bills and rent

I’ve three holes in my teeth

And a nation that pretends I didn’t almost die for it to survive

I am I am still here still here

I am still here and like the ocean, full of salt and shells

Full of ship remnants and noble ones

I bleed and the sand grieves

I be because someone survived for me to be here

Today

Breathing this almost air

Marching for cleaner belongings

My front seat beneath the deadening stars

Is still a seat

Is still a ground

Is still a home that I can pronounce my given name

To write amongst the forgotten names

The taken and the ignored

But today

            There are no tombstones

Today 

There is no true death

Only life

Only life

Only a song of the living

Maybe even a belief system

With water as its minister

         I am water

I dive into my own currents

I dress my dreams in the satin breath

Of my ancestors

I know 

I know

I know who I am

I know who I am because I believe it

--Mahogany L. Browne

The World Loves You Back

Even if no one ever touched you

with the tenderness you needed,

believe that the world’s been

holding you in its arms since

the day you were born. You are

not an accident or afterthought.

Let rain on the roof remind you.

Let sun on the skin, and the neon-

orange of the Mexican sunflower

at which a hummingbird pauses

to drink. There are so many ways

to hold and be held, and you

could spend your whole life

tallying them up, without ever

reaching the end of the list.

—James Crews

August Sunrise

Our minds give off the light

that reveals the connections

linking us one to the other

like the newly risen sun

making visible the dew-

tipped spider webs spun

in the fields last night:

each shining thread drawing

the separate blades of grass

closer together, weaving

a wide patchwork net

which catches everything

that flies into its path.

—James Crews

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

- Wendell Berry

For all that has been — thanks. For all that shall be — yes.

--Dag Hammarskjold

 No matter where life takes you, the place that you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard, and love wide and love long and you will find the goodness in it.

--Susan Vreeland

 No amount of regret changes the past. No amount of anxiety changes the future. Any amount of gratitude changes the present.

-Ann Voskamp

 Embodied presence is an invitation, again and again, to soften, to settle, to relax, to open up to what’s here. When we’re driven along by our habitual thinking patterns, we’re holding those tensions. A free body is a relaxed body, an open body.

--Martin Aylward

 Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity.

--Robin Wall Kimmerer

 Attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.

--Robin Wall Kimmerer

 Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily, and I must return the gift.

–Robin Wall Kimmerer

Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.

--bell hooks 

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Joan Didion

Stone

And what am I doing here, in a yurt on the side of a hill

at the ragged edge of the tree line, sheltered by conifer and bay,

watching the wind lift, softly, the dry leaves of bamboo?

I lie on the floor and let the sun fall across my back, 

as I have been for the past hour, listening to the distant traffic,

to the calls of birds I cannot name. Once, I had so much

I wanted to accomplish. Now, all I know is that I want

to get closer to it - to the rocky slope, the orange petals

of the nasturtium adorning the fence, the wind's sudden breath.

Close enough that I can almost feel, at night, the slight pressure

of the stars against my skin. Isn't this what the mystics meant

when they spoke of forsaking the world? Not to turn our backs to it,

only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures - 

in favor of the pine's long shadow, the slow song of the grass.

I'm always forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting.

I want to leave something here in the rough dirt: a twig,

a small stone - perhaps this poem - a reminder to begin,

again, by listening carefully with the body's rapt attention

- remember? To this. to this.

--Danusha Lameris

The Traveling Onion

When I think how far the onion has traveled

just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise

all small forgotten miracles,

crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,

pearly layers in smooth agreement,

the way the knife enters onion

and onion falls apart on the chopping block,

a history revealed.

And I would never scold the onion

for causing tears.

It is right that tears fall

for something small and forgotten.

How at meal, we sit to eat,

commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma

but never on the translucence of onion,

now limp, now divided,

or its traditionally honorable career:

For the sake of others,

disappear.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

The Way It Is

Over and over we break

open, we break and

we break and we open.

For a while, we try to fix

the vessel—as if

to be broken is bad.

As if with glue and tape

and a steady hand we

might bring things to perfect

again. As if they were ever

perfect. As if to be broken is not

also perfect. As if to be open

is not the path toward joy.

The vase that’s been shattered

and cracked will never

hold water. Eventually

it will leak. And at some

point, perhaps, we decide

that we’re done with picking

our flowers anyway, and no

longer need a place to contain them

We watch them grow just

as wildflowers do—unfenced,

unmanaged, blossoming only

when they’re ready—and my god,

how beautiful they are amidst

the mounting pile of shards.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer