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