Short Stories

We are all short stories though we want to be novels

The long kind, the Russian kind,

War and Peace, any of the Dickens titles.

The thing is, we rarely get beyond seventy or eighty pages,

Making us novellas at best,

Not in the game with Methuselah,

Not living long enough to figure out the ending,

Instead having to settle for hoping

We and the characters in our story

Will all get out of this mess alive.

We don't.

I don't mean to spoil the ending, but there you are.

--Alberto Rios

 The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. 

The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

--bell hooks

The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft's restaurant over a soda. 

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent but no faith that I could be. 

Martha said to me, very quietly, "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have a peculiar and unusual gift, and you have so far used about one-third of your talent." 

"But," I said, "when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied." 

"No artist is pleased." 

"But then there is no satisfaction?"

"No satisfaction whatever at any time," she cried out passionately. "There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

― Agnes De Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham

For One Who is Exhausted

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,

Time takes on the strain until it breaks;

Then all the unattended stress falls in

On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.

Things you could take in your stride before

Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.

Gravity begins falling inside you,

Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.

And you are marooned on unsure ground.

Something within you has closed down;

And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.

The desire that drove you has relinquished.

There is nothing else to do now but rest

And patiently learn to receive the self

You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken

And sadness take over like listless weather.

The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.

Learn to linger around someone of ease

Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,

Having learned a new respect for your heart

And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

-- John O'Donohue

Excerpt from the blessing, 'For One Who is Exhausted,' from John's books:

Benedictus (Europe) / To Bless the Space Between Us (US)

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too

marvelous to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with

those who say "Look!" and laugh in

astonishment, and bow their heads.

~Mary Oliver

When autumn winds blow

Not one leaf remains

The way it was

--Togyu (Died 1749)

Gratitude

is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without and beside us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things must come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the colour blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face across the table, of a son's outline against the mountains, is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit even stranger inner lives beneath calm surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. 

Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

--David Whyte 

In CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Revised Edition 

© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2020

Gratitude

Rain after days of sunshine.

Sunshine after days of rain.

The chance to move after sitting,

and the chance to curl up and not move.

Mist rising as the frost melts.

Leftovers.

The bitey puppy and the tottery old dog.

Not knowing how much time you have,

but knowing it is always limited.

Internet friends.

Neighbors.

The mandolin, which I play badly

and often. Hormone pills,

which mostly mute the hot flashes.

Wool socks. Rain boots.

All of the mixed blessings,

which is the only kind of blessing there is.

--Lynn Ungar Nov 2022

For When People Ask

I want a word that means

   okay and not okay,

  a word that means

devastated and stunned with joy.

   I want the word that says

  I feel it all all at once.

The heart is not like a songbird

   singing only one note at a time,

  more like a Tuvan throat singer

able to sing both a drone

   and simultaneously

  two or three harmonics high above it—

a sound, the Tuvans say,

   that gives the impression

  of wind swirling among rocks.

The heart understands the swirl,

   how the churning of opposite feelings

  weaves through us like an insistent breeze

leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,

   blesses us with paradox

  so we might walk more openly

into this world so rife with devastation,

   this world so ripe with joy.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (A Hundred Falling Veils)

 Generosity means giving, making sacrifices. It's something that people have been doing since who-knows-when. If we were to stop being generous or to stop making sacrifices for one another, the world wouldn't be able to last as a world  -  because even animals are generous with one another, just like human beings. They share their food with one another just like we do. They live together and eat together, feeding their offspring and caring for them. Take ants, for example: Each one helps carry food back to the nest. Other animals take food back to their hole or their hollow in a tree and eat it together.

We human beings live in families, in social situations. To the extent that we are involved with others, to the extent we make sacrifices for one another, beginning with the sacrifices that parents make for their children and continuing with those that we make for society at large. We live together by being generous, by making sacrifices for one another. Our hearts and our lives depend on one another, which is why we need to do this.

(Ajahn Maha Boowa)

Cherry Tomatoes

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,

breathless heat.

I sit on the ground

in the garden of Carmel,

picking ripe cherry tomatoes

and eating them.

They are so ripe that the skin is split,

so warm and sweet

from the attentions of the sun,

the juice bursts in my mouth,

an ecstatic taste,

and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,

sloshing in the saliva of August.

Hummingbirds halo me there,

in the great green silence,

and my own bursting heart

splits me with life.

--Anne Higgins

From  At the Year's Elbow.

There Is Another Way

There is another way to enter an apple:

a worm’s way.

The small, round door

closes behind her. The world

and all its necessities

ripen around her like a room.

In the sweet marrow of a bone,

the maggot does not remember

the wingspread

of the mother, the green

shine of her body, nor even

the last breath of the dying deer.

I, too, have forgotten

how I came here, breathing

this sweet wind, drinking rain,

encased by the limits

of what I can imagine

and by a husk of stars.

--Pat Schneider

 “Self-love is not just about constantly giving yourself praise and telling yourself how awesome you are. It’s about loving the real you, the human you - the person who has feet of clay, who comes undone under criticism, who sometimes fails and disappoints others. It’s about making a commitment to yourself that you will stick by yourself - even if no one else does. That’s what I mean when I say you must love yourself as though your life depends on it, because quite simply, I know without a doubt that it does.”

~Anita Moorjani

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before.

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message

Larger than anything you've ever heard,

Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,

Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose

Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers

A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about

To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's

Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

--Robert Bly

Blackbirds

I am 52 years old, and have spent

truly the better part

of my life out-of-doors

but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head

a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air

and when I turned my face upward

I saw a flock of blackbirds

rounding a curve I didn’t know was there

and the sound was simply all those wings

just feathers against air, against gravity

and such a beautiful winning

the whole flock taking a long, wide turn

as if of one body and one mind.

How do they do that?

Oh if we lived only in human society

with its cruelty and fear

its apathy and exhaustion

what a puny existence that would be

but instead we live and move and have our being

here, in this curving and soaring world

so that when, every now and then,

mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives

and when, even more rarely,

we manage to unite and move together

toward a common good,

and can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it’s meant to be.

-- Julie Cadwallader Staub

 To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. - Emily Dickinson

On Meditating, Sort Of

Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished

if you entertain a certain strict posture.

Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.

So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that

even better place — half asleep — where the world,

spring, summer, autumn, winter —

flies through my mind in its

hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time

reveal their true attitudes: they never

heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

Of course I wake up finally

thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,

made out of earth and water,

my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —

all that glorious, temporary stuff.

-- Mary Oliver (From Blue Horses)

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

- Mary Oliver

In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, 

I must listen to the birds

and in order to hear the birds

the warplanes must be silent

--Marwan Makhoul

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us,

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

"For the Children" by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island. © New Directions, 1974.

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