Thursday, April 25, 2024

ME: When are things going to get easier? 
OLD WOMAN: They already are. 
ME: Doesn’t feel like it. I keep waiting for Creator to step in. 
OLD WOMAN: She already has. She always will. Keep faith burning in your heart. 
ME: I have. I’ve been waiting for things to change. 
OLD WOMAN: Faith isn’t about waiting for things to change. Faith is the constant effort to keep pushing through. 
ME: What’s on the other side? 
OLD WOMAN: You. 

― Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations

All that we are is story. From the moment we are born to the time we continue on our spirit journey, we are involved in the creation of the story of our time here. It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind. We are not the things we accumulate. We are not the things we deem important. We are story. All of us. What comes to matter then is the creation of the best possible story we can while we’re here; you, me, us, together. When we can do that and we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, one story at a time. 

― Richard Wagamese 

I am constantly surrounded by noise: TV, texts, the internet, music, meaningless small talk, my thinking. All of it blocks my consciousness, my ability to her the ME that exists beneath the cacophony. I am my consciousness, my awareness of my circumstance, my presence in every moment. So I cultivate silence every morning. I sit in it, bask in it, wrap it around myself, and hear and feel me. Then, wherever the day takes me, the people I meet are the beneficiaries of my having taken that time - they get the real me, not someone shaped and altered by the noise around me. Silence is the stuff of life.

― Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations

Me: What if we're wrong?
Old Woman: Wrong about what?
Me: All this ceremony, prayer, meditation. What if, at the end of it, all there is is nothing?
Old Woman: Then we still come out better people.
Me: How?
Old Woman: Can you think of a better way to live than in gratitude? Can you think of a better way to be than to be kind, loving, compassionate, respectful, courageous, truthful, and forgiving? Even if we're wrong, can you think of a better way to breathe than through all that?
...
I couldn't. I can't. I continue.

― Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations

Sunday, April 21, 2024

If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

--Robin Wall Kimmerer

"come to your senses"
isn't about using your brain
(or at least it shouldn't be)
it is an instruction to come into the current moment

imagine if we stopped
a few times each day
and truly came to our senses
maybe for a moment
all of our collective narratives
would pause

and we would simply
hear the sound of rain
smell the lilacs blooming
taste sweetness of an orange
see the colours of a rainbow
feel the warmth of a human hand

everybody, come to your senses

--daniel baylis

Monday, April 15, 2024

Winter, Spring

Winter is black and beige down here
from drought. Suddenly in March
there’s a good rain and in a couple
of weeks we are enveloped in green.
Green everywhere in the mesquites, oaks,
cottonwoods, the bowers of thick
willow bushes the warblers love
for reasons of food or the branches,
the tiny aphids they eat with relish.
Each year it is a surprise
that the world can turn green again.
It is the grandest surprise in life,
the birds coming back from the south to my open
arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.

by Jim Harrison
from Dead Man’s Float

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

--Naomi Shihab Nye
From Red Suitcase

People don't live on [Earth]. ... Oh, [it] may be the place where the body eats, but they live elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit... the centre of their heads. 
-- The Last Continent, Terry Pratchett
when the moon passes by
and blocks out the sun
the world will see
but only for a moment
what grieving can feel like.
darkness.
and no one knowing
how to look at you.

sara rian

Words for the Road

Know, now, there is no one
who can guide you.
Know there will be nothing
to return to.
Know, now, that the trial
will be long.

Come, then. You were called to this,
this wild life.
Go in
and lie down in the darkness.
Hear them now, the wild flocks
in the starlight,
thrashing in the vastness of their passing?

If you cannot have a home, become a song.

-Joseph Fasano

If we shut our hearts to the pain of the world our celebrations become superficial. If we let that pain overwhelm our hope, we are lost in the dark. Tears in which pain and joy flow together do justice to life in its fullness.

--Brother David Steindl-Rast

The more you think you need to accumulate, the bigger fence you need to build around yourself and the fewer people you will trust and let into your life. It’s the inverse of what it means to live in true peace and security, which only comes in the context of relationship with people you can trust.

--Gareth Higgins


how do you create community?
i do not know
a hundred ways
a thousand ways
but
how do you kill community?
I can tell you one
sure to do the job.
be self-sufficient.
always have enough
always have it together
always be a giver
always have all the tools you need
never need to borrow a sewing needle
never need a cup of sugar
never tell anyone you're breaking down
never need anyone.
your pride
your insistence on competency
your unwillingness to be a burden
on us
when it is the proper time for you to collapse
may be the end of us all.
knowing what time it truly is
or knowing how to know the time at all
you
needing our help
being unable to continue without it
you
not knowing 
how to do everything
creates the occasion
for the village to reconstitute itself
and know itself again

--Tad Hargrave

Welcome Home

I understand:
for years, perhaps, you have lived
underground. Handling only
darkness, you have not become
accustomed to it. You want to get out.
One day you find an object which
may be a chair; at any rate,
a surface. Standing on
this dark thing, you reach up.
Here at the top the smell
is oppressive, sweet. You almost
fall. But you push, and the top begins
to crack. Plaster, or something, falls
around you. Emerging, you know
the smell: cake. Noise, lights:
you are outside, standing giddily on the top,
swathed in ribbons. And there
are all your friends,
dressed up, half drunk. The applause
is enormous. It is a party
for you. One of the crowd, the drunkest
and happiest, shrilling through a megaphone
“Welcome home,”
is me.

-- Everette Maddox
From The Paris Review no. 58 (Summer 1974)

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Today I asked my body what she needed,
Which is a big deal
Considering my journey of
Not Really Asking That Much.

I thought she might need more water.
Or protein.
Or greens.
Or yoga.
Or supplements.
Or movement.

But as I stood in the shower
Reflecting on her stretch marks,
Her roundness where I would like flatness,
Her softness where I would like firmness,
All those conditioned wishes
That form a bundle of
Never-Quite-Right-Ness,
She whispered very gently:

Could you just love me like this?

{Hollie Holden, June 2016} https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=990659447717928&set=a.388682557915623 

Monday, April 8, 2024

Everyone is babbling about what happens after death

Everyone is babbling about what happens after death.
Superstitious villagers insist we become
peculiar wandering spirits,
while simple religious hearts assume our goal
to be sweet heavenly existence.
Lovers long to play
in eternal companionship with Divinity,
while mystics strive
to merge completely with Divine Reality.
Scriptures of radical wisdom maintain
that the apparent soul is like space within a jar.
When death shatters our earthen vessel,
only the open space of awareness remains.
Who is there to unify with whom?

This intoxicated poet who belongs to Goddess Kali
knows all opinion to be void of substance.
Mother's mystery eludes
every earnest practitioner or philosopher
who assumes negative or positive energy
to be substantial or real.
This mirror mind and rainbow body
are her marvelous play
through the transparent medium of her elements.
After death, her dancing elements flow on,
and simply Mother remains.

The singer of this liberating song
laughs loud and long:
"We will be in the end
what we were in the beginning,
clear bubbles forming and dissolving
in the stream of timeless Mother Wisdom."

--Ramprasad Sen



Paradox of Noise

It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal
noise when we first try to sit in silence.

It is a paradox that experiencing pain releases pain.

It is a paradox that keeping still can lead us
so fully into life and being.

Our minds do not like paradoxes. We want things
To be clear, so we can maintain our illusions of safety.
Certainty breeds tremendous smugness.

We each possess a deeper level of being, however,
which loves paradox. It knows that summer is already
Growing like a seed in the depth of winter. It knows
that the moment we are born, we begin to die.
It knows that all of life shimmers, in shades of
becoming-that shadow and light are always together,
the visible mingled with the invisible.

When we sit in stillness we are profoundly active.
Keeping silent, we hear the roar of existence.
Through our willingness to be the one we are,
We become one with everything.

--Gunilla Norris

everybody wants to hear that
everything is going to be alright

here is an alternative version:
many things are going to be alright
but also some things will not be alright
some things will get broken
and then we will fix them
but other things will be so broken
that we can't fix them
and grief will be inevitable

and it will continue like this
indefinitely

so rest well
and eat good food
and drink water
because you will need stamina

I will see you out there
thank you and goodnight

--daniel baylis

Aubade

O, this morning, not a cloud in the sky, and coffee, black,
the way I like it.  I have been watching a phoebe, dark hood
and wagtail bobbing, as he flits back and forth from the beauty
bush to the eave of the shed, just yards from this red Adirondack
chair where I’m sitting, breathing the day through my skin.
It rained last night, and the chair’s damp slats are cool
on my back; there’s a scree of frogs in the swamp, a creek
of sound in the background, a river of desire: Here I am. Find me. 
Felicitous. That’s the only word to describe this. The sun pours
warm honey from its great glass jar, no matter how little we deserve it.
Some of us drag a heavy load through the day, a sack of should of’s,
or push a bushel of sorrow up a hill. But there’s the phoebe coming
back with his bit of straw or broken twig. He has a job to do,
and he sticks with it. And then he opens his beak and sings.

--Barbara Crooker

Love and the Deli Counter

At my Stop & Shop the ladies at the deli counter
give us free slices of meat so we can talk about
how thin we want it. Everyone wants it thinner
but me. A woman asks for four slices shaved
ham. She can have anything she wants. I want
two pounds of turkey, sliced thick. I never
got the thin slice thing; it's hard to pick up. It tears.
It takes the ladies longer to cut it up. Here's what
I hate: inconveniencing ladies. One of the deli ladies
tells me the provolone piccante smells like feet and I
say Way to sell it! I make her coworker laugh,
which is all I want from a trip to the Stop & Shop.
She and I keep looking at each other, nodding as if
we are listening seriously while foot-taste cheese
lady makes her case; the foot taste is a good thing!
Then she wants to talk about not wearing socks
as a kid, getting in trouble with her mom. I love
them both. I am eating a free slice of turkey, thanking
them, telling another lady in the store I love the blue
and yellow grosgrain ribbon down her jeans' seams,
telling another I love your boots. There are no men
in the store. Saturday afternoon; we stroll the aisles,
kind to each other. Some days Boston is just a bunch
of women calling out to each other I LOVE YOUR DRESS!
We eat free turkey, help each other find the sour cream.
The checkout girl's name tag says Love. Love tells me
her mom called her love so much she just changed it.
I love it, love my Stop & Shop, her name, love
when people, strangers, call me love or lovie. At the gym
Christine says Hello, love until she learns my name;
a shame. At the deli counter, a woman dries her hands,
smiles at me, says and what can I get you, my love?

-- Jill McDonough
From AMERICAN TREASURE 2022 Jill McDonough.




Words to Say When Walking Out the Door

Yes, you will be damaged.

You will fail sometimes
and wildly.

Grief may snag its antlers
in your branches
before it leaves you,
before it finds its way.

Life, my one life,
can you hear me?
Someone in the sleep they call their waking
will crush your wonder,
and you will crush their wonder.

Bring your wonder; bring it anyway.

--Joseph Fasano

you don't
criticise the moon
for not shining
the same each night

you don't
look up at it and say
you're not trying hard enough

because the moon
doesn't have to be
full and bright
every night to be loved

and neither do you.

--ida banks

No umbrella, getting soaked,
I’ll just use the rain as my raincoat.

--Daito Kokushi

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

~Ryokan

Percy (2002-2009)

This -- I said to Percy when I had left
our bed and gone
out into the living room couch where
he found me apparently doing nothing -- this
is called thinking.
It's something people do,
not being entirely children of the earth,
like a dog or a tree or a flower.
His eyes questioned such an activity.
"Well, okay," he said. "If you say so. Whatever
it is. Actually
I like kissing better."
And next to me,
tucked down his curly head
and, sweet as a flower, slept.

--Mary Oliver from  "Dog Songs"

I have just said

I have just said
something
ridiculous to you
and in response,

your glorious laughter.
These are the days
the sun
is swimming back

to the east
and the light on the water
gleams
as never, it seems, before.

I can't remember
every spring,
I can't remember
everything-

so many years!
Are the morning kisses
the sweetest
or the evenings

or the inbetweens?
All I know
is that "thank you" should appear
somewhere.

So, just in case
I can't find
the perfect place-
"Thank you, thank you."

--Mary Oliver

Abhirupananda ~ Delighting in Beauty

Haven't you spent enough time
comparing your hair
and your clothes
and your face
to the hair
and the faces
and the clothes
of those around you?

See the body for what it is.

Real beauty is in 
the clear open light 
of the nonjudgmental heart.

--Matty Weingast

Sangha ~ Community

When I left the only home I'd ever known,
I thought I'd left everything behind.

But I was still carrying
all the years
of running
back and forth
and around in circles
after this or that.

Just sitting still, 
those circles
have broken apart
and been carried away
by this simple wind
blowing in
and out.

All your old thoughts
like snow
falling
on
warm
ground.

Just sit back and watch.

--Matty Weingast

Monday, April 1, 2024

Breaking Ground

Living in the violence of spring-
living in a time
where shells are cracking
and shapes alter,
who can afford to risk
forgetting the danger,
forgetting the moment
the crocus bulb breaks ground,
never knowing whether
snow or sun or ice
await in warm or jagged welcome.

There is no safety in
this restless season.
Even the sheltering ground
rejects its own,
thrusting the life it held
into the untrustworthy
and insufficient care
of air and weather.

There are no choices here-
no careful path or
reasoned way,
no holding in reserve for
some more settled,
more propitious time,
but only the unconsidered
faith of the crocus
whose saffron petals echo
or demand the sun.

-Lynn Ungar

With Astonishing Tenderness

When, in the middle of the night, 
you wake with the certainty you’ve
done it all wrong, when you wake
and see clearly all the places you’ve failed,
in that moment, when dreams will not return, 
this is the chance for your softest voice—
the one you reserve for those you love most—
to say to you quietly, oh sweetheart, 
this is not yet the end of the story. 
Sleep will not come, but somehow, 
in that wide awake moment there is peace—
the kind of peace that does not need
everything to be right before it arrives. 
The peace that comes from not fighting 
what is real. The peace that rises
in the dark on its sure dark wings 
to meet you exactly as you are.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Trust

It's like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.
The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers—
all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn't.
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.
And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

-- Thomas R. Smith
From Waking before Dawn