The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates not by building, but by hacking away.

--Alan Watts

The Quiet Listeners

Go into the woods

and tell your story

to the trees.

They are wise

standing in their folds of silence

among white crystals of rock

and dying limbs.

And they have time.

Time for the swaying of leaves,

the floating down,

the dust.

They have time for gathering

and holding the earth about their feet.

Do this.

It is something I have learned.

How they will bend down to you

so softly.

They will bend down to you

and listen.

--Laura Davies Foley

 Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention. 

Be astonished. 

Tell about it.

-Mary Oliver

Earthside

We are asked to arrive here, earthside,

To occupy every inch of the body we’re given,

To learn its language, its needs and gifts.

We are asked to use it as a compass

To harbour us in safety

And lead us through the wild.

We are asked to care for this place,

With the grit and grace of dirt on our hands.

We are asked to speak,

To give voice to the voiceless

And translate light to language,

To cast the widest net,

To include everything inside of it,

To crack the heart wide open

And never close it again.

When we are pulled apart by longing,

We are asked to keep showing up,

To follow this soft, insistent tether:

To become what we love,

To pour ourselves into the hands of the ancestors,

To be held by them like water,

To quench the mouths of our children,

To nourish them with who we become.

We are asked to belong, finally

To ourselves, to each other, to the land,

To our own shapeshifting shadows,

To our own threadbare, indelible light.

We are asked to belong to the old tales that brought us here

And to the new ones that will keep us alive,

We are asked to belong to the Great Turning Wave

Of this time and this place.

We are asked to punctuate our breath

with both sorrow & praise

We are asked to answer by becoming

Again and again the way.

--Emily Kedar

Tread softly! All the earth is holy ground

- Christina Rosetti

The Pond

August of another summer, and once again

I am drinking the sun

and the lilies again are spread across the water.

I know now what they want is to touch each other.

I have not been here for many years

during which time I kept living my life.

Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he

    could sing,

I wish I could sing.

A little thanks from every throat would be appropriate.

This is how it has been, and this is how it is:

All my life I have been able to feel happiness,

except whatever was not happiness,

which I also remember.

Each of us wears a shadow.

But just now it is summer again

and I am watching the lilies bow to each other,

then slide on the wind and the tug of desire,

close, close to one another,

Soon now, I'll turn and start for home.

And who knows, maybe I'll be singing.

--Mary Oliver

"Enlightenment is intimacy with all things." —Thirteenth-century Buddhist priest and writer Dōgen Zenji

 “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”

― Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

On the Longest Day of the Year

There is comfort in knowing

that every year

since the earth was made

there has been

a longest day of the year—

a day when half of all life

wakes to an abundance of light

and then in that moment

of greatness leans again

toward the dark.

There is comfort in knowing

the light comes, the light leaves,

the light comes, the light leaves,

comfort in knowing

all the light that is

reaches toward us,

whether we can see it or not.

It is simply a matter

of staying out of our own way,

and if we can’t do that,

well, that is what patience is for.

-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,

earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.

Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake

and look out––no guarantees

in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,

like right now, like noon,

like evening.

- William Stafford

I open the windows

What I wanted

wasn’t to let in the wetness.

That can be mopped.

 

Nor the cold.

There are blankets.

 

What I wanted was

the siren, the thunder, the neighbor,

the fireworks, the dog bark.

 

Which of them didn’t matter?

 

Yes, this world is perfect,

all things as they are.

 

But I wanted

not to be

the one sleeping soundly, on a soft pillow,

clean sheets untroubled,

dreaming there still might be time,

 

while this everywhere crying.

--Jane Hirshfield

Memory Sack

That first cry opens the earth door. 

We join the ancestor road. 

With our pack of memories 

Slung slack on our backs 

We venture into the circle 

Of destruction, 

Which is the circle 

Of creation 

And make more-

--Joy Harjo

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

Who has it, and who doesn’t?

I keep looking around me.

The face of the moose is as sad

as the face of Jesus.

The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.

One question leads to another.

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Why should I have it, and not the anteater

who loves her children?

Why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?

What about the blue iris?

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?

--Mary Oliver

 Death is love's sister, the sister with the shadowed face. 

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Before spring

Bless the buds that have yet to open,

the bare branches turning red.

Bless the green noses of bulbs

as they push through the soil,

and the raucous starlings 

in their tree conventions.

Bless the quince that blooms early--

no one wants its fruit. Bless

the days of rain and the days of fog,

the mud and the mess of it.

Bless the first dandelions, raising

brave, unwelcome, golden heads.

Bless this time when the world

is not yet beautiful, but you

can smell change in the air.

--Lynn Ungar

I don’t ask for the sights in front of me to change, 

only the depth of my seeing.

– Mary Oliver

It is said that before entering the sea

a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,

from the peaks of the mountains,

the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,

she sees an ocean so vast,

that to enter

there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk

of entering the ocean

because only then will fear disappear,

because that’s where the river will know

it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,

but of becoming the ocean.

-- Kahlil Gibran

My grandma was a seamstress 

before she left this world.

Now she stitches together stars

that long to be

part of a constellation.

In the right moonlight

I can spot her up there

mending all the loneliness

in the universe.

--Andrea Gibson

Beginners

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,

Hope and desire set free,

Even the weariest river

Winds somewhere to the sea -“

But we have only begun

To love the earth.

We have only begun

To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?

- so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?

- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,

only begun to envision

how it might be

to live as siblings with beast and flower,

not as oppressors.

Surely our river

cannot already be hastening

into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot

drag, in the silt,

all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet -

there is too much broken

that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other

that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know

the power that is in us if we would join

our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must

complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

--Denise Levertov

 No story can contain you.

--Ivan M. Granger

Evening

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors

which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look,

and soon these two worlds both leave you,

one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,

not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,

not so unswervingly given to the eternal as

that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs-

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads) 

your own life, timid and standing high and growing, 

so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out, 

one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

Original German:

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,

die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält;

du schaust: und von dir scheiden sich die Länder,

ein himmelfahrendes und eins, das fällt;

und lassen dich, zu keinem ganz gehörend,

nicht ganz so dunkel wie das Haus, das schweigt,

nicht ganz so sicher Ewiges beschwörend wie das,

was Stern wird jede Nacht und steigt -

und lassen dir (unsäglich zu entwirrn) dein Leben

bang und riesenhaft und reifend, so daß es,

bald begrenzt und bald begreifend, abwechselnd 

Stein in dir wird und Gestirn.

There is deep beauty in not averting our gaze. No matter how hard it is, no matter how heartbreaking it can be. It is about presence. It is about bearing witness.

- Terry Tempest Williams

Thank You

If you find yourself half naked 

and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing, 

again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says 

you are the air of the now and gone, that says 

all you love will turn to dust, 

and will meet you there, do not 

raise your fist. Do not raise 

your small voice against it. And do not 

take cover. Instead, curl your toes 

into the grass, watch the cloud 

ascending from your lips. Walk 

through the garden’s dormant splendor. 

Say only, thank you. 

Thank you. 

From Against Which. Copyright © 2006 by Ross Gay.

Whoever now makes himself bigger, freer and more human in his own existence, is doing his part toward peace, — as yet it must be worked at in an inward direction, not until a few have it all big and ready within them can it let itself be brought into the world.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters, 1892-1910

It’s still possible

It’s still possible to fully understand

you have always been the place

where the miracle has happened:

that you have been since your birth,

the bread given and the wine lifted,

the change witnessed and the change itself,

that you have secretly been, all along,

a goodness that can continue

to be a goodness to itself.

It’s still possible in the end

to realize why you are here 

and why you have endured, 

and why you might have suffered 

so much, so that in the end, 

you could witness love, miraculously 

arriving from nowhere, crossing 

bravely as it does, out of darkness, 

from that great and spacious stillness 

inside you, to the simple, 

light-filled life of being said.

…

--David Whyte

Excerpt From STILL POSSIBLE

in ‘Still Possible’

Many Rivers Press Jan 1st 2022