Break open a cherry tree,

and there are no flowers. 

But the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms. 

--Ikkyu

Hopelessness is impatience in disguise. If you are hopeless, that means you think the game is already over. And I'm here to tell you: the game is NOT over yet. 

--Joanna Macy

Fire

What makes a fire burn

is space between the logs,

a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

too many logs

packed in too tight

can douse the flames

almost as surely

as a pail of water would.

So building fires

requires attention

to the spaces in between,

as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build

open spaces

in the same way

we have learned

to pile on the logs,

then we can come to see how

it is fuel, and absence of the fuel

together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log

lightly from time to time.

A fire

grows

simply because the space is there,

with openings

in which the flame

that knows just how it wants to burn

can find its way.

--Judy Brown, from The Sea Accepts All Rivers

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body's been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

--Mark Strand

(1934-)

The Change

Overnight, the frost

took every pink zinnia

every creamy dahlia,

fading their colors to brown.

The nasturtiums have slumped

into dense wilted tangle.

The marigolds hold themselves tall

in a blackened and upright

surrender. For now,

the bright, fresh bouquets

I made yesterday are still

bright and fresh in their vases.

This beauty, we know, won’t stay.

The message is simple:

All that rises passes away.

I see it in these hands

that planted and watered

and weeded and picked—

my skin now wrinkled and thin

as frost-withered petals.

Here: the chance to witness

my own rising and passing.

How natural to age, to die.

The flowers in the vase will wilt.

With every day, so do I.

Such strange gift. First

the joy of putting the self

in service to making something

beautiful. Then, beyond joy,

the grace in learning to let it all go.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Leaves

Years do odd things to identity.

What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of a leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

as the wind moves through the leaves.

--Ursula K LeGuin

We call it letting go,

as if the work were soft-

a gentle unhanding,

a sigh into the dark.

But really, it is labour.

Elbow-deep in what once was,

rolling up sleeves,

turning what we thought was finished

into the start of something fertile.

Rot is not surrender.

It is participation.

The slow alchemy of apple cores, heartbreak,

old selves and half-remembered dreams-

each softened by rain,

each broken open by time.

To compost is to stay.

To lean close when it smells of endings,

and know that endings are only

the earth’s way of rearranging life.

So I do not “let go.”

I kneel.

I dig my hands into the heat of decay

and whisper thanks to the worms

for their silent teachings.

This is how I make peace with change:

not by release,

but by return,

by trusting that the work of rot

is the work of love,

and that what I tend here,

beneath my nails and grief,

will one day feed me again.

- Brigit Anna McNeill

After Samhain

Now, for a while, the dark

stays dark. The long nights

will be long no matter

how you pray for light.

This god will not be rushed.

But she will offer you

the thick black folds of her cloak,

where you're finally free

to lose everything

that can't be kept.

--James Pearson

The birds have vanished into the sky. 

And now the last cloud drains away. 

We sit together, the mountain and I 

until only the mountain remains.

--Li Po

A Little Pep Talk

The swirling ash

doesn’t try

to be become

log again.

The flying leaves

don’t attempt

to return

to the tree.

The girl

can’t untwist

her genome

back into

separate strands.

The flour

in the bread

can’t return

to the sack,

can’t undo

the kneading

of hands.

In all things

lives a memory

of letting go

and the chance

to transform

into what

it can’t know.

What do you say

to that, heart?

Good self,

what do you say

to that?

--Rosemerry Wahtolla Trommer

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the   

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

take them up like the male and female   

paper dolls and bang them together   

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

--Sharon Olds

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

from The Miracle of Mindfulness

Most people try

hard to do good

and find out too late

they should have

tried softer.

-- Andrea Gibson

When I point to the obviously wonderful aspects of my life as the source of my joy, it predisposes me to believing the challenges in my life are what rob me of my joy. As soon as I began exploring the ways I could be grateful for the hard stuff, I no longer felt like the outer-world was the sole dictator of what was happening in my inner-world. 

--Andrea Gibson

Breath, you invisible poem!

Pure, continuous exchange

with all that is, flow and counterflow

where rhythmically I come to be.

Each time a wave that occurs just once

in a sea I discover I am.

You, innermost of oceans,

you, infinitude of space.

How many far places were once

within me. Some winds

are like my own child.

When I breathe them now, do they know me again?

Air, you silken surround,

completion and seed of my word.

--Rilke

There isn't any

It is lovely when there is no next thing.

You are simply doing this

and there is no next thing.

You are not thinking

as soon as I get this finished

I can get started on the next

because there isn't any.

There is simply this.

You are doing it now.

And it is lovely.

--Pat Ingoldsby

From a Country Overlooked

There are no creatures you cannot love.

A frog calling at God

From the moon-filled ditch

As you stand on the country road in the June night.

The sound is enough to make the stars weep

With happiness.

In the morning the landscape green

Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.

The day is carried across its hours

Without any effort by the shining insects

That are living their secret lives.

The space between the prairie horizons

Makes us ache with its beauty.

Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue

To the farthest cold dark in the universe.

The cottonwood also talks to you

Of breeze and speckled sunlight.

You are at home in these

great empty places

along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.

You are comfortable in this spot

so full of grace and being

that it sparkles like jewels

spilled on water.

--Tom Hennen

The Way it Is

One morning you might wake up

to realize that the knot in your stomach

had loosened itself and slipped away,

and that the pit of unfulfilled longing in your heart

had gradually, and without your really noticing,

been filled in—patched like a pothole, not quite

the same as it was, but good enough.

And in that moment it might occur to you

that your life, though not the way

you planned it, and maybe not even entirely

the way you wanted it, is nonetheless—

persistently, abundantly, miraculously—

exactly the way it is.

--Lynn Ungar

A Scrap in Time

Something about the relentless beauty

of the dahlias this year makes me forget

lists and calls and news and aches as

I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,

watching them bloom in real time, not

wanting to miss a moment of the long stems

rising, the red color deepening then fading

from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse

begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening

again, and now a hundred years pass,

now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden

bed is gone and the fence is gone and

the trees and the ditch and the home

are gone, and there’s no way to know

this was once a place where dahlias grew.

Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you

to come stand here with me to watch

the dahlias open themselves to the sun,

each petal a hymn to the present,

a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time

we might put in a vase and marvel as

all around it the whole world spins.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Dreams Before Waking

Despair falls:

the shadow of a building

they are raising in the direct path

of your slender ray of sunlight

Slowly the steel girders grow

the skeletal framework rises

yet the western light still filters

through it all

still glances off the plastic sheeting

they wrap around it

for dead of winter

At the end of winter something changes

a faint subtraction

from consolations you expected

an innocent brilliance that does not come

though the flower shops set out

once again on the pavement

their pots of tight-budded sprays

the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold

and at such a price

though someone must buy them

you study those hues as if with hunger

Despair falls

like the day you come home

from work, a summer evening

transparent with rose-blue light

and see they are filling in

the framework

the girders are rising

beyond your window

that seriously you live

in a different place

though you have never moved

and will not move, not yet

but will give away

your potted plants to a friend 

on the other side of town

along with the cut crystal flashing

in the window-frame

will forget the evenings

of watching the street, the sky

the planes in the feathered afterglow:

will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold

where still you can manage

to go on paying rent

where still you can believe

it’s the old neighborhood:

even the woman who sleeps at night

in the barred doorway — wasn’t she always there?

and the man glancing, darting

for food in the supermarket trash –

when did his hunger come to this?

what made the difference?

what will make it for you?

What will make it for you?

You don’t want to know the stages

and those who go through them don’t want to tell

You have four locks on the door

your savings, your respectable past

your strangely querulous body, suffering

sicknesses of the city no one can name

You have your pride, your bitterness

your memories of sunset

you think you can make it straight through

if you don’t speak of despair.

What would it mean to live

in a city whose people were changing

each other’s despair into hope? –

You yourself must change it. –

what would it feel like to know

your country was changing? –

You yourself must change it. –

Though your life felt arduous

new and unmapped and strange

what would it means to stand on the first

page of the end of despair?

 - Adrienne Rich

For You Who Are About to Give Up

Do it. Give up

the old ghosts, the old fears; give up

the shadowy house of childhood,

the voices like knives spilled in the kitchen;

give up the stories

you never meant to be, your father's

rage, your mother's silence inside you.

Stay, stay

in this one world

but give it up, give it up to wonder.

I am here. I will hold you

through the hard part. I will thumb away

the cold thorns from your face.

And then,

my love, when you are ready,

when you've told yourself

no one is ever ready,

give up

that life you never meant to be,

those clothes that have worn you

like old ghosts, those dreams

you have carried in you like winters.

Give up

and walk out through the rivers

and look at it, that old moon

in the spruces. She is trying, she is still trying

to tell you: like a child,

like a bride stepping

from a wedding dress, give up

every heft you have borrowed

and live the life you have imagined.

In your life is where the dead are saved.

--Joseph Fasano

“A man who can’t cry is a social time bomb... In my village, emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace.”

— Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa

September

And now the first winds

purr what they've been learning

like a children's choir

flipping through their hymnals.

This test again, this wintering,

this bite.

Summer, Summer's roads are over-

And all these leaves,

this foliage on your shoulders-

like all the ghosts of childhood's

wild silence

laying on their hands

as though to guide you.

It is time to fall into your life.

-Joseph Fasano

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs-all this resinous, unretractable earth.

--Jane Hirshfield

The Difficult Countryside

I talk more to trees and mice than I let on. Flies, too.

And cars. Actually, I’m a regular chatterbox

to what doesn’t respond. So I understand prayer.

The way a street’s a street, but catch it right, and with

good framing, the street achieves art. So I get out my bike 

and take off down it, with headphones and a little cloud

of dust. I need to get myself to Marfa and see the lights.

Not really, but saying that gives me a starting point.

I’m having a debate with my third eye. It goes like this:

if I have a deeply unsettling dream about someone,

does it change my perception of them? Should it?

Maybe it should change my perception of me.

Maybe I’m catching some subtle clue my sleep

is trying to warn me about. I ask the trees and mice about it,

the flies and cows. Aren’t we all injured by our art?

All the grandmothers, as one, are banging apple pies

against their kitchen windows, wanting out of our flashbacks.

I wave. I know everyone in this town. I’m filled with purpose,

because playing music makes everything a movie.

I appeared from nowhere, to tell you this. I will be gone 

just as fast, turning the corner of University Drive

and Sixteenth Street, spelled out just like that. S I X

T E E N T H. I’ve never been this happy before 

and I don’t know what to do with myself. The wind’s even

at my back. The sun is mostly down, 8 pm. Summer’s

listening, but only to an ‘80s playlist, so we’re safe.

Why isn’t everyone doing this? America! What?

I don’t know. But it feels great out here. The trees say hi.

--John Gallaher

Can I weave a nest of silence

The phoebe sits on her nest

Hour after hour,

Day after day,

Waiting for life to burst out

From under her warmth.

Can I weave a nest of silence,

weave it of listening,

listening, listening,

Layer upon layer?

But one must first become small,

Nothing but a presence,

Attentive as a nesting bird,

Proffering no slightest wish

Toward anything

that might happen or be given,

Only the warm, faithful waiting,

contained in one’s smallness.

Beyond the question,

the silence.

Before the answer,

the silence.

--May Sarton

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness

out of which comes the unbroken,

a shatteredness

out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow

beyond all grief which leads to joy

and a fragility

out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

too vast for words

through which we pass with each loss,

out of whose darkness

we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

whose serrated edges cut the heart

as we break open to the place inside

which is unbreakable and whole,

while learning to sing.

--Rashani Rea

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime

we will learn everything

there is to learn: what the world is, for example,

and what it means. I think this as I am crossing

from one field to another, in summer, and the

mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either

knows enough already or knows enough to be

perfectly content not knowing. Song being born

of quest he knows this: he must turn silent

were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly

unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display

the small suns of their center piece, their - if you don't

mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course

I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and

narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,

to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;

for example - I think this

as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -

the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the

daisies for the field.

--Mary Oliver

Could It Happen Anywhere?

Listen to the rhythm of things that never die.

                  —Mark Nepo, “For a Long Time”

Worried about what was to come, I went to the river

and listened to the constant song as water met stone,

met log, met wall. The endless white hush of it.

Song of building up banks. Song of tearing them down.

Song of surrender to invisible force. Song of change

that is ever the same and not the same. And in the listening,

I found refuge—not in the longing to hide, not in the sound—

I found refuge in the listening. Refuge in the opening

of the senses. In attuning to what is here. Wave and current

and eddy and flow and the attentiveness that lives

through this woman. And I listened and listened, listened

to it all, and was opened by listening. At some point

the listener disappeared. What was left was

listening itself. For a time, peace found me there.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Camas Lilies

Consider the lilies of the field,

the blue banks of camas opening

into acres of sky along the road.

Would the longing to lie down

and be washed by that beauty

abate if you knew their usefulness,

how the native women boiled

the bulbs for food?

And you — what of your rushed and

useful life? Imagine setting it all down —

papers, plans, appointments, everything,

leaving only a note:

"Gone to the fields to be lovely.

Be back when I’m through

with blooming."

--Lynn Ungar

Medicinal

I start accepting food from the neighbors:

Handful of tomatoes before they rot.

Annual s’more at the bonfire. I savor

odd things—quick knock at the door, apricot

pit in the window. Small shrines appear.

There are flats of strawberries. Homemade

broth to help a harmed esophagus heal.

We all mend, somewhere, in the exchange.

Little gifts evolve into meals, board games

after lunch. One day my son is with grand-

mother neighbors, pulling weeds in the yard.

I’m at their side before I understand.

We kneel together, chewing on mint leaves,

like it’s no miracle, like it’s ordinary.

--Megan Nichols

Keep Reaching

The trick is to keep reaching

for the light you will never touch,

and to be nourished by the stretch

toward impossible things.

The trick is to bloom where you are,

not calling it a failure because

you wanted a different outcome.

Live each day devoted to awe, 

so that when a monarch lands 

on the tip of a coneflower, seeming 

to swell with that sudden infusion 

of sweetness, you don’t miss it. 

So that, while you watch, a pair 

of hard-won wings seems to open 

and close and open again in you.

—James Crews

Beyond Patience

If I knew another word for patience,

would it open me to the act?

Perhaps something that invokes the patience

in the zinnias after first central flower has died

and before the next buds are formed.

Something that speaks to the patience of winter

while the field is greening more deeply every day.

To be patient is to believe there is a moment

beyond now that will be better than now. 

So perhaps instead of patience, the word

I’m longing for is presence. The capacity

to be only here. Only now. Here in the garden

where the zinnia row is thick with leaves.

Here in the meadow where it’s warm and

the tall grass tickles my bare thighs. Now

in the week before my sweet girl arrives.

Ah, there it is, back to the anticipation.

Try again. Presence, as in now, in this moment

when swallows swoop and skate and swirl.

Now, when my breath opens in my chest,

opens like a zinnia, many petalled and red.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Heron rises from the dark, summer pond

So heavy

is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,

always it is a surprise

when her smoke-colored wings

open

and she turns

from the thick water,

from the black sticks

of the summer pond,

and slowly

rises into the air

and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,

I take the deep breath

of happiness, and I think

how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,

how improbable

that ascension is not possible,

though everything seems so inert, so 

nailed

back into itself —

the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,

the turtle,

the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful

that the summers are long

and the ponds so dark and so many,

and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,

this decision,

this trailing of the long legs in the water,

this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden

gray-blue sheets of her wings

strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing

takes her in.

—Mary Oliver

One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself’. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

— A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes

--Stanley Kunitz

She Let Go

She let go.

She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.

She let go of the fear.

She let go of the judgments.

She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.

She let go of the committee of indecision within her.

She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.

Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice.

She didn’t read a book on how to let go.

She didn’t search the scriptures.

She just let go.

She let go of all of the memories that held her back.

She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.

She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.

She didn’t promise to let go.

She didn’t journal about it.

She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.

She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.

She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.

She just let go.

She didn’t analyze whether she should let go.

She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.

She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.

She didn’t call the prayer line.

She didn’t utter one word.

She just let go.

No one was around when it happened.

There was no applause or congratulations.

No one thanked her or praised her.

No one noticed a thing.

Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.

There was no effort.

There was no struggle.

It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.

It was what it was, and it is just that.

In the space of letting go, she let it all be.

A small smile came over her face.

A light breeze blew through her.

And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…

--Safire Rose

Dogfish

...

You don't want to hear the story

of my life, and anyway

I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story - - -

a few people just trying,

one way or another,

to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean,

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

swim through the fires to stay in

this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish

better wake up and dash themselves away

from the hopeless future that is

bulging toward them.

*

And probably,

if they don't waste time

looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

--Mary Oliver

The Myth of Sisyphus

We tend to think of Sisyphus as a tragic hero, condemned by the gods

to shoulder his rock sweatily up the mountain, and again up the mountain, forever.

The truth is that Sisyphus is in love with the rock. He cherishes every roughness

and every ounce of it. He talks to it, sings to it. It has become the mysterious Other.

He even dreams of it as he sleepwalks upward. Life is unimaginable without it,

looming always above him like a huge gray moon.

He doesn’t realize that at any moment he is permitted to step aside, let the rock

hurtle to the bottom, and go home.

Tragedy is the inertial force of the mind.

--Stephen Mitchell 

Symphony

In the womb, we learn to listen

long before we can even breathe.

Maybe this is our body’s way

of saying, listening is a form of

breathing, and hearing is more 

essential than air. Maybe we spend 

our lives trying to get back to a time 

when the voices around us sounded 

like a distant music, strange song 

of the everyday that plays even now 

when I pause at the street corner 

before crossing, and just listen—

to snippets of phone conversations, 

someone’s radio, a mother calling 

to her child to keep him near—this 

endless symphony of the world.

—James Crews

How does one hate a country, or love one? ... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

Ursula K LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

--Omar el Akkad

The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves - or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the monsters won't find you. 

 But it's all an illusion, because they die too, these people who roll up their spirits into little tiny balls to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did. 

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause... It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. 

--Sophie Scholl, executed 22 February 1943

“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”

― Naomi Shulman

In a time of hate  

Love is an act of resistance  

In a time of fear  

Faith is an act of resistance  

In a time of misinformation  

Education is an act of resistance  

In a time of poor leadership  

Community is an act of resistance  

In a time like this  

Joy is an act of resistance  

Resist. Resist. Resist. 

–Loryn Brantz

Authoritarians cannot rise if there are strong communities. and if people are acting with joy. That is, you need despair and anger for an authoritarian to rise. Whatever those things are that you bring to the community - do them and do them with joy. And don't stop doing the things you love because you are scared, because that actually is a form of resistance. Showing up and doing things that you love says to an authoritarian: 'You have no place to root here.' " 

--Heather Cox Richardson

Right now all movements for love, care, material well-being, diversity, this earth, and humans having a future on this earth need to remember that we need each other. We must remember that there are organized forces working to disorganize and confuse us, turn us against each other and diffuse our power. We are not immune to the chaos of the world, but we can choose to be a grounding force together.

–Adrienne Maree Brown

You can’t expect anyone to save a world they’re not in love with.

--Josie George

Go to where suffering is aligned with your capacity to meet it. You don’t have to go to death row or live in a monastery. You don’t have to sit with the unsheltered if that’s not your work. Go to where you can care safely and deeply and broaden that capacity over time.

--Roshi Joan Halifax

Light

I want to write of the light

but I do not know

whether words can illuminate

the way it hangs

upon branches and bird wings

and broken things

returning beings to beauty.

Can words spin substance

from sunshine and decay?

Can words cajole

celebration from night-weary

birds?

Can words warm surfaces

of stones and sorrows?

Can words reveal richness

in mundane

and battered

things?

I do not know.

But if we would write

a tomorrow

which is wider than wounds

we have worn,

we might wield words

like benedictions

and remember

blessings

within brokenness,

beginnings

within endings,

and beauty

within all things.

-- Bernadette Miller

Dear Stranger,

1. 

There was never not a bridge 

from your chest to mine. 

My heartbeat was always 

the sound of your feet walking towards me. 

I can’t believe how many years 

I lived without knowing 

the air you were breathing out, 

was the air I was breathing in. 

Forgive me for not saying ‘thank you’

before our lungs had reason to hide.

2.

Fear is what you make it 

and I’ve been trying to make it my teacher. 

When the lesson starts to break me

I remember the dogs in the shelters-- 

how even those we call ‘the mean ones’

will follow their fear to each other’s sides 

in the middle of the night,

make pillows of each other’s chests 

when they think no home is coming.

Almost everyone in the world

is softer than they look.

3.

Do you pray now more than you used to? 

I pray all of the time. I pray to The Big Bang 

and to The Tiny Bang and to The Bangs 

we’ll all have to cut ourselves so we can see 

what beauty can only be seen from 6 feet away.

4. 

Last night, a poet whose writing I love said he hasn’t written 

a single poem since the beginning of the quarantine.

He said every time he’s inclined to 

              he calls someone he loves instead.

5.

The first thing I learned from this virus 

was to question everything wanting to go viral.

The second thing I learned was to dream 

only giant dreams.

6.

A giraffe’s neck is 6 feet long. 

A decade from now will I remember the week

I spent wondering if I could hug a giraffe’s torso 

and not get sick if the giraffe coughed?

I don’t want to forget anything about this. 

Especially not how it feels to worry 

about everyone I love at the same time. 

So much of the world had been doing that already.

7.

If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days 

before killing a beloved character off, 

how many centuries must god have spent sobbing 

before pressing a pen to the page of this year?

8.

I used to be a gardener in New Orleans. 

Every evening I’d spend almost an hour 

cleaning the earth out of my nails. 

She held on so tight. I loved her more for it.

Later I moved to the desert and was sitting

beside a cactus in my living room

when I heard a hurricane named Katrina 

was about to hit my former home. 

'Save the flowers', I said out loud, 

watching a storm cloud rage its hungry spiral 

across the television screen. 'Save the flowers', I said, 

having no idea we wouldn’t save the people.

9.

When the water left the city I went back,

drove through the 9th Ward to a church

that had been gutted by the storm.

The preacher had spray-painted his phone number 

across the length of the falling building.

There was something about his phone number

being as tall as the door––I couldn’t stop crying.

The world falls apart and people 

become foundation.

--Andrea Gibson

In the 1970s, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More that a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. 

As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs. 

Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, “I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs.” He grinned at the crowd and said, “So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about *you* singing them.” 

He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years. 

What could the government do? Arrest a hundred thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the fame of a man whose songs were on the lips of the whole world. 

-- Richard Chamberlain

We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

 

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

 

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

 

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

 

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

 

In the sixth month

of a disastrous reign in the house of money

 

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

 

lived happily during the war.

Copyright © 2013 by Ilya Kaminsky. 

"There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering which leads to more suffering, and the suffering which leads to the end of suffering. The first is the pain of grasping after fleeting pleasures and aversion for the unpleasant, the continued struggle of most people day after day.

The second is the suffering which comes when you allow yourself to feel fully the constant change of experience - pleasure, pain, joy, and anger - without fear or withdrawal. The suffering of our experience leads to inner fearlessness and peace."

- Venerable Ajahn Chah

you are but a collection of atoms

working together

in temporary harmony

before being dispersed

back into the universe

your earthly task is to help

those atoms

radiate

imagine the simplicity:

you need not

achieve anything

but gently glow

--Daniel Baylis

"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen." 

Rene Daumal

In the Meantime

Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.

The moon rises, and the sun.

Babies smile and somewhere,

Against all the odds,

Two people are falling in love.

Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.

Light plays on the surface of water.

Grace occurs on unlikely streets

And we hold each other fast 

Against entropy, the fires and the flood.

Life leans towards living

And, while death claims all things at the end,

There were such precious times between,

In which everything was radiant

And we loved, again, this world.

--Tom Hirons

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.

Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

~Arundhati Roy, ‘The Cost of Living’

The Question

All day, I replay these words:

Is this the path of love?

I think of them as I rise, 

as I wake my children, 

as I wash dishes, 

as I drive too close behind the slow blue Subaru, 

Is this the path of love?

Think of these words as I stand in line at the grocery store, think of them as I sit on the couch with my daughter. 

Amazing how quickly six words become compass, the new lens through which to see myself in the world. 

I notice what the question is not.

Not, 

"Is this right?" 

Not,

"Is this wrong?" 

It just longs to know how the action of existence links us to the path to love.

And is it this? 

Is it this? 

All day,

I let myself be led by the question.

All day I let myself not be too certain of the answer. 

Is it this?

Is this the path of love? I ask as I wait for the next word to come.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, 

Family Recipe

All day, I search for it,

the secret ingredient—

something my father

believed in. He always

made stuffing

with something extra

special something,

then made us guess

what the secret was.

All day, I notice

what goes into a day—

a total of 86,400 seconds,

and in every second

a choice of how

we will meet that second.

If the day is stuffing,

then this day has

some unusual ingredients:

a couple dozen folks

in swimsuits on the sidewalk,

one woman with a dying parrot

she has tucked in her sweater,

a whole garden full of lemon trees,

one ripe hour alone

in the sunshine on a rooftop,

a generous measure of laughter

as my daughter and husband and I

climb a near-vertical hill,

and bittersweet tears

as I think of Dad

and his love of secret ingredients.

All day, the world

shows off its flavors.

All day, I revel in the recipe,

this extraordinary day,

something that can never

be made the same way again.

-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

"It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on."

From "Midnight Library" a fantasy novel by Matt Haig

The world is violent and mercurial- it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love -- love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

--Tennessee Williams

The first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

-Frank Herbert (Dune, 1965)

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

--Wallace Stevens

Beannacht ("Blessing")

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you. 

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight. 

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home. 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

~John O'Donohue

Don't Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

--Mary Oliver

In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.

In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.

In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.

I realized, through it all, that…

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

--Albert Camus

Love, Like Water

We could say the pain

was a block so great

        it could not be moved.

We could say love

did not try to move it.

        Love simply surrounded the mass

and dissolved it

the way water meets a block of salt,

        breaking apart each ionic bond

until every atom of sodium and chloride

is surrounded by molecules of water.

        And in this way,

and sooner than you’d think,

the pain was rearranged

        into minuscule bits,

and there was no part of the pain

that was not touched by love.

        The pain was no less, it’s true.

But mixed with love, dispersed,

the pain became something new.

        Something vital that encouraged

a different kind of life,

a substance that supported buoyancy—

        a medium to carry me.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Hope is … is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing, regardless of how it turns out.

--Václav Havel

Part of our work as people who dare to believe we can save the world is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing, so that we may lose and still set out again, anyhow. 

--Julian Aguon 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

—James Baldwin

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

We have to meditate

on being the rivers

so that we can experience

within ourselves

the fears and hopes

of the rivers.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

As she stared at the restless pixels on her screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. 

--Ruth Ozeki, "A Tale for the Time Being"

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we're going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.

--Dan Savage

A Prayer for these Times

When they hate, I will love.

When they curse, I will bless.

When they hurt, I will heal.

I am a servant of the light.

I am not afraid of darkness.

I will carry on with my work

as a steward of this Earth

and of all her children.

When they divide, I will unite.

When they rage, I will calm.

When they deny, I will affirm.

I will simply be who I am: for that is

what Spirit created me to be.

--Bishop Steven Charleston: Elder of the Choctaw Nation

Forgiveness

May the tide

never tire of its tender toil

how over and over

it forgives the Moon

the daily exile

and returns to turn

mountains into sand

as if to say,

you too can have

this homecoming

you too possess

this elemental power

of turning

the stone in the heart

into golden dust.

-- Maria Popova

Brahmaviharas

Out of the rich soil of good will grows the beautiful flower of compassion, watered by tears of joy and shaded by the great tree of equanimity.

--Longchenpa

Blessing for the longest night

All throughout these months,

as the shadows

have lengthened,

this blessing has been

gathering itself,

making ready,

preparing for

this night.

It has practiced

walking in the dark,

traveling with

its eyes closed,

feeling its way

by memory,

by touch,

by the pull of the moon

even as it wanes.

So believe me

when I tell you

this blessing will

reach you,

even if you

have not light enough

to read it;

it will find you,

even though you cannot

see it coming.

You will know

the moment of its

arriving

by your release

of the breath

you have held

so long;

a loosening

of the clenching

in your hands,

of the clutch

around your heart;

a thinning

of the darkness

that had drawn itself

around you.

This blessing

does not mean

to take the night away,

but it knows

its hidden roads,

knows the resting spots

along the path,

knows what it means

to travel

in the company

of a friend.

So when

this blessing comes,

take its hand.

Get up.

Set out on the road

you cannot see.

—Jan Richardson

from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

The Opening

I feel it before dawn -

the longing not only for light

but for the vast embrace

of the dark,

the way it links me

to the farthest reachings

of the universe,

the way it holds

each dull planet,

each luminous star,

holds me with no question,

no reservation,

holds all I love

and all I have yet

to learn to love.

With each breath

I bring it into my body,

small sips of dark,

great gulps of dark.

Inside me it swirls

with my love of light,

and this is how the certainties

of the heart are erased-

when I love and ache

in two directions at once-

and what's left

is so raw, so open,

so alive.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The World I Live In

I have refused to live

locked in the orderly house of

reasons and proofs.

The world I live in and believe in

is wider than that. And anyway,

what's wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn't believe what once or

twice I have seen. I'll just

tell you this:

only if there are angels in your head will you

ever, possibly, see one.

-Mary Oliver

How to Survive

Love the small things of the earth.

The dust. The dark rain in the lemon trees.

The sound of moonflowers opening

at evening. Love them

even when the sky is burning,

even when a mother crouches with her child

in a dark room, wetting his lips

with a small glass of water. Love them

quietly, quietly but ferociously,

their hearts in them like flocks

the wind has furled.

And then, in the spring, if the world

has survived, walk out

with your gift that you have practiced,

your fresh gift that has ripened in secret;

lie down in the long, soft grass of summer

and wait for love, wait for it

to find you-

and when it lays its hand at last

upon your shoulder, open

to all that is about to happen;

rise up and walk off into the lemon trees

and live awhile, live awhile

with someone-their eyes, their scent, their curls-

and when love departs, when love

is done and fallen, stand there

in the coming winds of autumn

and turn back to the small things

that have been with you-

buttons, apples, chapters-

and then, because you've practiced this

forever, because you are ready now

for the hardest task of all of them,

lay your hand on the changed face in the mirror

and look at it-its wounds, its crimes, its changes-

and tell yourself what you see

deserves your mercy-that face, that name, that stranger-

and place your palms on that one life in the mirror

and open to the whole of it, the whole of it,

and love it like the last chance of the world.

-Joseph Fasano

Gus Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, says, "I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don't know how to do that."

Yonatan Neril, Leo Dee

Eco Bible: Volume 1: An Ecological Commentary on Genesis and Exodus

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

--William Stafford

My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;

Every year the green ivy grows longer.

No news of the affairs of men,

Only the occasional song of a woodcutter.

The sun shines and I mend my robe;

When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems.

I have nothing to report, my friends.

If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after

so many things.

- Ryōkan Taigu (1758 - 1831)

From 'One Robe, One Bowl', the Zen Poetry of Ryōkan, translated by John Stevens.

The Paradox

When I am inside writing,

all I can think about is how I should be outside living.

When I am outside living,

all I can do is notice all there is to write about.

When I read about love, I think I should be out loving.

When I love, I think I need to read more.

I am stumbling in pursuit of grace,

I hunt patience with a vengeance.

On the mornings when my brother's tired muscles

held to the pillow, my father used to tell him,

For every moment you aren't playing basketball,

someone else is on the court practicing.

I spend most of my time wondering

if I should be somewhere else.

So I have learned to shape the words thank you

with my first breath each morning, my last breath every night.

When the last breath comes, at least I will know I was thankful

for all the places I was so sure I was not supposed to be.

All those places I made it to,

all the loves I held, all the words I wrote.

And even if it is just for one moment,

I will be exactly where I am supposed to be.

--Sarah Kay

Winter Poem

once a snowflake fell

on my brow and i loved

it so much and i kissed

it and it was happy and called its cousins

and brothers and a web

of snow engulfed me then

i reached to love them all

and i squeezed them and they became

a spring rain and i stood perfectly

still and was a flower

--Nikki Giovanni 

Where did the middle go?

It's always near the end

that I'm startled into presence-

my morning walk nearly over,

my coffee down to its last sip.

Where have I been? Where did

the middle go? I've been asking

all my life. But then what's ending

shakes me back into my body,

the way autumn calls to you

with its waving yellows

and falling reds: "Witness me!"

it seems to shout. "I'm here

only for a moment."

--James A Pearson

a love note to my body:

first of all,

I want to say

thank you

for the heart you kept beating

even when it was broken

for every answer you gave me in my gut

for loving me back

even when

I didn't know how to love you

for every time you recovered when I pushed you past our limits

for today,

for waking up.

- cleo wade

A Journey

It's a journey ... that I propose ... I am not the guide .. . nor

technical assistant ... I will be your fellow passenger ...

Though the rail has been ridden ... winter clouds cover ...

autumn's exuberant quilt ... we must provide our own guide-

posts . . .

I have heard ... from previous visitors ... the road washes out

sometimes ... and passengers are compelled ... to continue

groping ... or turn back ... I am not afraid ...

I am not afraid ... of rough spots ... or lonely times ... I don't

fear ... the success of this endeavor ... I am Ra ... in a space

.. . not to be discovered ... but invented

I promise you nothing ... I accept your promise ... of the

same we are simply riding ... a wave ... that may carry ... or

crash ...

It's a journey ... and I want ... to go ...

--Nikki Giovanni

you are not on call

for the pain of the world

I know you feel every hit of the hammer, beating

plowshares into swords,

and people into plowshares

and every time you fail to step between

the blow and it’s target

the injustice is sewn into your bones, too

and so

when the hammer rises, you must rise with it

raising your voice your eyes your awareness your body

whatever part of you that can given as an offering

you cannot stay this way forever

sewn to this cacophony of blows

every movement of yours a follow

until your body is owned by the drumbeat of

the raising of weapons

until your days string together in a stuttering heartbreak of rage

and you can’t

       catch

             your breath

but this is what you promised

to those who don’t get to choose whether or to to show up for the fight

you promised

that you would hold nothing back

I know

except, you cannot be on call

for the pain of the world

it is not work that can be done

without sleep

when we said that people are too sacred to be

beaten into plowshares 

or swords

we meant you

we need you

for the fight

and we need you for all the things

that are less, and more, than fighting

we need you to be ready to listen in the soft way earth listens

to rain in the hours before dawn

to be tender, to cradle precious things, to hold the smell of dew in your hair

to hum the song that flowers 

will rise up through the earth to hear

I need you 

to stay

in love with the world

--Liz James

Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:

And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.

I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,

actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.

Can make, from last year's late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,

then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,

and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,

brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.

Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don't despair of this falling world, not yet

didn't it give you the asking

--Jane Hirshfield