In Those Years

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves

reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life

and yes, that was the only life

we could bear witness to

 

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

along the shore, through the rags of fog

where we stood, saying I

 

--Adrienne Rich

Summons

Last night I dreamed

ten thousand grandmothers

from the twelve hundred corners of the earth

walked out into the gap

one breath deep

between the bullet and the flesh

between the bomb and the family.

They told me we cannot wait for governments.

There are no peacekeepers boarding planes.

There are no leaders who dare to say

every life is precious, so it will have to be us.

They said we will cup our hands around each heart.

We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water,

a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping,

the mourners will embrace, and grief replace

every impulse toward harm.

Ten thousand is not enough, they said,

so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves

into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes.

You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages

and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think

I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner.

Let’s go.

--Aurora Levins Morales

 "...And that's what your holy men discuss, is it?" [asked Granny Weatherwax.]

"Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin. for example." [answered Mightily Oats.]

"And what do they think? Against it, are they?"

"It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."

"Nope."

"Pardon?"

"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that--"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"

"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

--from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.

To feel as if you belong is one of the great triumphs of human existence — and especially to sustain a life of belonging and to invite others into that… But it’s interesting to think that … our sense of slight woundedness around not belonging is actually one of our core competencies; that though the crow is just itself and the stone is just itself and the mountain is just itself, and the cloud, and the sky is just itself — we are the one part of creation that knows what it’s like to live in exile, and that the ability to turn your face towards home is one of the great human endeavors and the great human stories.

It’s interesting to think that no matter how far you are from yourself, no matter how exiled you feel from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society — that, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate exactly the way you don’t feel at home in the world — to say exactly how you don’t belong — and the moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already taking the path back to the way, back to the place you should be.

You’re already on your way home.

--David Whyte

Love after love

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

--Derek Walcott

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) from his 1920 collection of fragments, Wandering: Notes and Sketches

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing

that is more than your own.

Let it brush your cheeks

as it divides and rejoins beside you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,

you where the heart begins:

You are the bow that shoots the arrows

and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back

into the earth;

for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown

too heavy. You cannot bring them along.

Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

trans. Macy and Barrows

************

O ihr Zärtlichen, tretet zuweilen

in dem Atem, der euch nicht meint,

laß ihn an eueren Wangen sich teilen,

hinter euch zittert er, wieder vereint.

O ihr Seiligen, o ihr Heilen,

die ihr der Anfang der Herzen scheint.

Bogen der Pfeile und Ziele von Pfeilen,

ewiger glänzt euer Lächeln verweint.

Fürchtet euch nicht zu leiden, die Schwere,

gebt sie zurück an der Erde Gewicht;

schwer sind die Berge, schwer sind die Meere.

Selbst die als Kinder ihr pflanztet, die Bäume,

wurden zu schwer längst; ihr trüget sie nicht.

Aber die Lüfte … aber die Räume …

The News

Each morning we listen for what is breaking—

the sound of a thousand tragedies fills the air,

shattering that never stops,

headlines, a fleet of anchors tangled at our feet.

We watch, worried

if we turn away even for an instant,

it will all crumble the rest of the way.

Forget with me for a moment.

Take an unguarded breath.

Do it now, the world needs your attention here, too,

on the rise and fall of your shoulders,

the rustle of leaves outside the window,

the warm space between your gaze and mine.

--Emilie Lygren

Roses, late summer

If I had another life

I would want to spend it all on some

unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree

full of waving branches.

I wouldn't mind being a rose

in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred 

to them, nor ambition.

Reason they have not yet thought of.

Neither do they ask how long they must be roses,

and then what

or any other foolish question.

--Mary Oliver

You Can’t Have It All

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam’s twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,

so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,

but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,

it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,

but there is this.

-- Barbara Ras

 Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

- Simone Weil

Enjoyment

I get that you are looking for joy--

the moment that swoops down like an eagle

and carries off your soul like some 

enraptured and glistening trout.

We are all seeking those memories

we can pull out when we need to remember

the ways we still can shine. But what

about enjoyment, the practice of 

becoming en-joyed, as one becomes enrobed, 

wrapping yourself in a cloak of small beauties? 

What of the rain-washed leaves, the ripe 

tomatoes, the persistent bees? what of the 

squirrel burying hazel nuts, working on 

surviving the winter, never realizing 

how possible it is for planted things to grow?

--Lynn Ungar

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.

Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.

Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has

so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t

monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.

When dawn flows over the hedge you can

get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven

left lying around, can be picked up and saved.

People won’t even see that you have them,

they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.

You can shake your head. You can frown.

 – William Stafford

I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

 -- Emily Dickinson

Everything is waiting for you

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the

conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

--David Whyte

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