The Hummingbird

The sunlight speaks. And its voice is a bird:

It glitters half-guessed half seen half-heard

Above the flower bed. Over the lawn ...

A flashing dip and it is gone.

And all it lends to the eye is this --

A sunbeam giving the air a kiss.

Harry Kemp

Open from Deep Within

Sometime go outside and sit,
In the evening at sunset,
When there's a slight breeze that touches your body,
And makes the leaves and the trees move gently.
You're not trying to do anything, really.
You're simply allowing yourself to be,
Very open from deep within,
Without holding onto anything whatsoever.
Don't bring something back from the past, from a memory.
Don't plan that something should happen.
Don't hold onto anything in the present.
Nothing you perceive needs to be nailed down.
Simply let experience take place, very freely,
So that your empty, open heart
Is suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.

- Tsoknyi Rinpoche in Carefree Dignity

Reciting Poems

Reciting poems in the moonlight,

riding a painted boat...

every place the wind carries me is home.

-Yu Xuanji

This is My Motto

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common--this is my symphony."

~ William Henry Channing

My World Tuesday: Sunrise

Presence into Silence

Metta Inst Last night Ram Dass taught a group of caregivers, 80 in all, via Skype about "presence". His wise council included how to find a level above the disease, the story, the suffering, to relate soul to soul with another. He reminded us that we are not our personalities, our roles, but rather just loving-awareness. His grace touched hearts and minds, and then we fell back into silence.

What does Love give?

"Love gives us the fortitude to lighten the sorrow of others and ourselves. It soothes us like sweet cream and warms us into a gazing calm which makes us feel a sense of awe in the presence of something magical. Love helps us recognize the quiet grandeur or beauty of life. We notice the earth, the sky, a breathing, ...functioning planet, full-flowering gardens, and bending branches over silent walkways" C.J. Good

Married to Amazement

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world in my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
- Mary Oliver

Watch with glittering eyes

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. — Roald Dahl

The Longest Journey

The longest journey I've made
is the one back to myself.
~Ama

My World Tuesday

God's Lips Upon The Veil

God has never left you.

It is just

that your soul is so vast

that just like

the earth in its innocence,

it may think,

"I do not feel my lover's warmth

against my face right

now."

But look, dear,

is not the sun reaching down its arms

and always holding a continent

in its light?

God cannot leave us.

It is just that our soul is so vast,

we do not always feel God's lips

upon the

veil.

St. Catherine of Siena

Ready for Everything

"But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being."

- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet

I love all the advice Rilke gives to the young poet. I imagine being that young poet (though I am neither young nor really a poet), and soaking in the wisdom of an beloved elder.

r really a poet), ad soaking in the wisdom of an elder.

Knowledge

No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

~Ursula Le Guin

The Zen of Truth

Recognizing truth requires selflessness. You have to leave yourself out of it so you can find out the way things are in themselves, not the way they look to you or how you feel about them or how you would like them to be.

Harry Frankfurt, Princeton philosopher and best-selling author of “Fighting Bull”, in a NY Times magazine interview.

Sitting in meditation, I recognize the truth in what Frankfurt is saying. Truth seems to really only be truth in this moment. It's not really about me, it's about the unfolding of the moment. It isn't about what happened, or what might happen next. That, perhaps, is what I love so much about sitting on the cushion. Truth is revealed.

Chatting with Fish

The fish tell him:

"Hey Hafiz,
We see you know the joy of our existence,
We see you have learned how meditation
can free you from Land, Mind, Debts, Alimony-
The Whole Works,
And like us, let you carouse all day in God."

from: The Fish and I will Chat

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

~ John O'Donohue ~

All The Hemispheres

All The Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

~ Hafiz ~

Here's to Opening and Upward

   
here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon)
  
e.e.cummings
     

Blooming

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.~Anais Nin

The Soaring Impulse/Possible Dreams

While searching the Internet for the last poem I posted, The Sage, I found this blog: The Soaring Impulse I was so touched by the Graceful Presence of the author, Maithri. He has founded an organization called Possible Dreams International. Please read his blog, and contribute your "Whisper of Hope" to his work.

The Sage

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows.

while the Sage,

who has to duck his head when the moon is low,

keeps dropping keys all night long

for the beautiful

rowdy

prisoners.

--Hafiz

Wilderness

There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and loop and double-cross.


There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.


There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with porpoises … before land was … before the water went down … before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis.


There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced … yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.


There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.


O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

Who to Be?

The Thread

There's a thread you follow.
It goes among
things that change.
But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

-- William Stafford

THE OPENING OF EYES

That day I saw beneath dark clouds

the passing light over the water

and I heard the voice of the world speak out,

I knew then, as I had before

life is no passing memory of what has been

nor the remaining pages in a great book

waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.

It is the vision of far off things

seen for the silence they hold.

It is the heart after years

of secret conversing

speaking out loud in the clean air.

It is Moses in the desert

fallen to his knees before the lit bush.

It is the man throwing away his shoes

as if to enter heaven

and finding himself astonished,

opened at last,

fallen in love with solid ground.

— David Whyte

Gifts

My dreams are dreams of the pond
That lives not only to mirror the sky
But to let the surrounding willows and ferns
Refresh and cleanse me.

Through tree roots I make my way towards the leaves' veins
Their dying brings me no sorrow
For I've expressed myself,
I've won life.

My happiness is the sun's happiness
In a brief span of time I'll leave behind enduring works
That will strike gold sparks
In children's eyes, and
In a sprouting seedling
I'll sing a jeweled green song.
I am artless yet bountiful
I'm unfathomable.

My pain is the pain of seasonal birds
Only spring understands such passion.
Endure all hardships and failures,
Always fly toward a future of warmth and light.
Ah, the bleeding wings
Will write a line of supple verse
To enter deep within all souls,
Deep into all times.

All my feelings
Are a gift from earth.

—Shu Ting

Blessings of springtime

Our Task

"One hand on the beauty of the world, one hand on the suffering of all beings and two feet firmly grounded in the task of the present moment."

~ from the Cathedral of Autun, France

Door of Being

Door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of the pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,

door of being: open your being
and wake, learn to be ....

~ Octavio Paz ~

Listen

Circle of Morning

I sat and watched the sun come up.

I could hear it spreading across the vault of the softening sky;

hear the aural beauty,

the song, the earthen majesty of its touch,

the warmth and blessing,

the nourishment of its grace.

Color fading into gray

- another little death -

sweeping backward from where it first emerged;

the arc complete

the song fading into silence,

into the circle of morning.

Love Poem to God (this)

Did I expect any of this?

No, I did not expect this in my life.

I have been innocent of the expectations of this.

I did not expect to find in you the Friend of a lifetime,

or the sacred Other within you,

or the Deep-time experience

in an everyday conversation over tea.

I did not expect to find such rich blessings

in relationship with you.

You are my unexpected treasure

dear One.

Dream Time

Lovely Blog: Nekiya - The Descent

Photo: Andrew Goldsworthy

Indra's Net

Suspended above the palace of Indra ... is an enormous net. A brilliant jewel is attached to each of the knots. Each jewel contains and reflects the image of all the other jewels in the net, which sparkles in the magnificence of its totality.

-Daisaku Ikeda

A Friend Passes

This autumn an elderly friend died. She was ready, and her family was ready for this transition. There was a “Memorial Meeting” in the Friends tradition to honor and remember her.

A Friend, after sitting with her thoughts about Roberta for a long time, stood and said, “Two types of metal keep coming to my mind, and they describe Roberta. The metals are tempered steel and silver bells.” The Meeting made verbal utterance as to the perfection of that metaphor for our friend.

Earlier, I had risen and shared two things about Roberta. One was an experience that she had shared with me many years earlier that she said she hadn’t shared anyone because she didn’t know what to make of it. Roberta had told me that one day, in autumn, she had been looking around her farm, and “a golden maple tree just lit up, as though it were electrified.” The shock of the color went right through her, and changed her. I could tell by her voice the vulnerability of one who has been changed by things not understood by the mind.

The other sharing I offered was that although during Roberta’s early life she was engaged in a very structured religion, in her later years, after she had long given up that structure, she became more and more open. So open, that she would often ask in the silence of Meeting, “What is God, anyway?” with a completely open heart.

I have been richly blessed by knowing Roberta; I feel her spirit now moving in me.

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent.
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten,

where you have been begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you are the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher lovemaking
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

Goethe

Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

Judyth Hill

We Two

We two, how long we were fool'd,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings, side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds, spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbit and stellar, we are two comets,
We prowl fang'd and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

Walt Whitman
From 'Children of Adam', 'Leaves of Grass'

The Deepest Moment

The poet Mark Doty writes eloquently about his partner's death from AIDS, and how the process of decline gently stripped Wally of all that was not Everything, and how in that millrace he became most himself. Doty says that death is "the deepest moment in the world... even if that self empties into no one, swift river hurrying into the humble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents."

From Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast

Rumi Lifts Another Mirror

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you’d be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.

Rumi

Rumi begin with the grief for what was lost - a phrase that surely gets my attention. But Rumi says that this grief lifts a mirror. I recognize this is an amazing truth, a beautiful and enlarging insight. This mirror shows us where we are working, bravely working. Things look their worst in grief. And yet, there in the dark bitterness is the kindness of a friend, a lily in bloom, the soft satin of the blanket's edge. These signs work on me, and in my imaginings I connect with the essence of God; it is a fleeting feeling of being held, a feeling of hopefulness and of greatness enveloping me. I feel my sad, dragging, crying, loathsome self begin to soften, to look, to open to this light, and to the warmth of connection. I stretch my hand/heart open, just a little at first, then close again. Then, feeling a soft breeze upon my face, move to open again. I expand, and then contract, and somewhere within this slight movement is where I settle, balanced in a faint flutter.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing,
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and
the sweet confinement of your
aloneness to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

by David Whyte
From "The House of Belonging"

I / Thou

Martin Buber (1879-1965), Jewish theologian/philosopher, published his seminal work I and Thou in 1923. In this book he argues that we often objectify people, relating to them as we do things ("I-it" or "I – them"). He notes that it is possible to be truly open and vulnerable to another human being (or to God) when we entered into a relationship based on "I" and "Thou." This connection enlarges a person and makes true dialogue possible.

Gene Knudsen Hoffman

I've been contemplating what it looks / feels like when we enter an I / Thou relationship. Is there a way to describe that which epitomizes the I / Thou stance? I'm wondering if we could say of this relationship, "I love you just the way you are" and really feel the truth of it?

Selling flowers, Sapa

Selling flowers, Sapa
Originally uploaded by Meredith Krugel

Let it Rest

"I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room."

- May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude

This past year I have not produced many posts, as my friends who frequent here have undoubtedly noticed. I think that I just needed a rest, I needed days of not pushing. My mind has wandered, and rested, as I lived in the changing light of my rooms. I emerge refreshed, and peaceful. I am especially hopeful for the new year even though there are so many difficult realities.

Why is the Fire Hot?

One winter evening, when the innovative engineer R. Buckminster Fuller was drinking tea by the fireplace of Professor Hugh Kenner, three-year-old Lisa Kenner prolonged her bedtime farewell with the question: "Bucky, why is the fire hot?" Kenner writes: Some instinct told Lisa that he was the man to ask. His answer, as he took her on his lap, began, like most of his answers, some distance away from the question. "You remember, darling, when the tree was growing in the sunlight?" On arms like upgroping branches, his hands became clusters of leaves as he described their collecting the sunlight, processing its energies into sugars, drawing them down into a stocky trunk. "Then the men cut it down, and sawed it into logs. And what you see now" ---he pointed to the crackling hearth---"is the sunlight, unwinding from the log."

The Voice of Your Eyes

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(I do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)...

ee cummings

Tell me more, poet. Tell me about the power of intense fragility. Tell me about the textures that compel, and the color of countries. Tell me how death is rendered with breathing, and tell me about opening and closing; show me eyes that are deeper than roses. Show me...

The Swan

This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

-Rilke
Translated by Robert Bly

David Whyte says of this poem:

I realized it was much simpler, much simpler even than dying and living. All the swan does to effect its transformation from awkwardness to grace and belonging is move toward the element where it belongs. That's all it does. I thought it was an astonishing key, an extraordinary key to transformation: all you have to know in your life are the things you love, the things you hold in your affection. You only have to know the frontiers, where simply by being at that frontier, you come alive. Take an inventory of your life. What is the work that brings you alive? What are the places that bring you alive? What are the conversations that vitalize you? In whose presence, simply by being in their presence, do you find yourself making the best of yourself, do you find yourself coming to the fore? Will you have faith in those frontiers, those extraordinary places that effect extraordinary transformations, and will you arrange your life, so you can spend more time at those frontiers?

These are the questions I live. In my experience each soul knows when they are out of alignment with their heart and soul; on some level they know how far away from true north they have moved. When one moves into alignment with that which is most authentic in them, there is a wondrous synchronicity, meaningful coincidence and aliveness that infuses one's life. It just feels right, and others can recognize this. Energy becomes available that was locked away as other agendas were attended to; as we try to compensate for the lack of connection and authenticity. Like the swan out of water, awkward and out of his element, once he lowers himself down into the water, he is in his element, he is in the stream and is carried along in the current, transported and buoyed by the water, and what emerges naturally and spontaneously is authenticity, beauty, belonging, grace and genuineness.

Now is the Season

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and Spirit.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child's training wheels
To be laid aside
When you can finally live
With truth
And love.

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time
For you to deeply understand the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.
---Hafiz

Celebration

November 5, 2008

H.E. Barack Obama
President-elect of the United States of America
Washington, DC
U.S.A.

Dear President-elect Obama,

Congratulations on your election as the President of the United States of America.

I am encouraged that the American people have chosen a President who reflects America’s diversity and her fundamental ideal that any person can rise up to the highest office in the land. This is a proud moment for America and one that will be celebrated by many peoples around the world.

The American Presidential elections are always a great source of encouragement to people throughout the world who believe in democracy, freedom and equality of opportunities.

May I also commend the determination and moral courage that you have demonstrated throughout the long campaign, as well as the kind heart and steady hand that you often showed when challenged. I recall our own telephone conversation this spring and these same essential qualities came through in your concern for the situation in Tibet.

As the President of the United States, you will certainly have great and difficult tasks before you, but also many opportunities to create change in the lives of those millions who continue to struggle for basic human
needs. You must also remember and work for these people, wherever they may be.

With my prayers and good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

THE DALAI LAMA

The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
Holy Holy.


Persha Gertler

Emerald Parakeets

I finished Widening Circles, by Joanna Macy. There is grace and gratitude throughout, and passion; sensuous, lyrical paintings vibrant with color, sound and fragrance; so much richness springing from her fingers onto the page. Some examples:

... the tears I feel... come from the presence I feel all around me - its flaming emptiness, its freedom....I beheld the shapes of things, their colors and textures. I saw how they all fit together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle once they find their place. Everywhere I looked I saw contours meeting, greeting, full of happy secrets, one about the other... Now plays of light, color, scent brought starts of recognition and pleasure - as if my beloved were continually adorning himself for my delight.... Sometimes I seemed to sense my body from the outside, how its form and skin must feel to air, light, cotton dress. I thought, maybe it doesn't matter where you draw the line between in and out, self and other, even weakness and strength. These differences are but touch points in the dance of complementarity; like epidermal surfaces, they allow encounter and caress...A light rain spattered as I bathed in the well... In and out, above, below - how odd and intricate this dance. I remembered what the poet M. C. Richards had said once about solitude: "Learn to move in the world as if it were your lover."

*

But by the very plans I had devised with John, I wasn't allowed to stay sitting there as a human, marooned in human culpability. As the others had I moved back from the center to the periphery, to see and speak from that wider context. From here we could see more clearly the isolation in which the humans imagine themselves to exist, and the fear that seizes them - a fear that generates greed and panic. For our own survival we - all beings - must help them. Could we help these twentieth century humans, the way we helped Arther pull the sword form the stone?

*

It is such a luxury to reflect at length on those who have graced our lives. Soon our concerns and intentions for them give way to thanksgiving for their existence; to see their qualities afresh is like opening a present on Christmas morning....Soon they seem to be walking beside us in the bright, green morning. I pretend they can see through my eyes the emerald parakeets swooping by the red hibiscus blossoms and feel through my soles how the marble cools in the shade.

A Gift of Darkness

Inspired by a Brazilian folktale, The Sea Serpent’s Daughter

~~

I would gather darkness from
Under my pillow,
From under my blanket and
From under my bed.

I would gather dark from
My Mom’s kitchen cabinets in the kitchen,
From my toy closet behind everything and
From the mud.

I would gather darkness from
A trashcan,
From a metal clothes closet and
From underground.

I would gather dark from
The sky,
From under a tree and
From nighttime.

I would put the dark in a cardboard box,
And surround it with metal,
Color it red, and put pink
Ribbon on it.
I’d decorate it with stars.

I would close the box
With a lock, a blue and grey metal lock,
And tie it up with a red and white
Dotted string.

I would give it to my Grandma
Who is tired from
Mowing the lawn
All daylong.

I would find her in the living room
Lying on the couch.
Grandma would say,
“THANKS!”

A group poem by Ms. Benedetto’s 1st & 2nd grade,
Yoncalla Elementary School

Sunset at the North Pole

As if Dreaming

The sky becomes one with its clouds
the waves with their mist.
In Heaven's starry river, a thousand sails
dance.
As if dreaming, I return to the place
where the Highest lives,
and hear a voice from the heavens:
Where am I going?
I answer, "The road is long,"
and sigh; soon the sun will be setting.
Hard to find words in poems to carry
amazement:
on its ninety-thousand-mile wind,
the huge inner bird is soaring.
O wind, do not stop--
My little boat of raspberry wood
has not yet reached the Immortal Islands.

Chinese Poet Li Qingzhao

from Admiring Lotuses

(translated by Jane Hirshfield)

On-Line at the Nameless Cafe

Siting here at the Nameless, sun streaming in the windows, chatting with God on the laptop, love wordlessly pointing out how sweet the music is, how exquisitely enchanting the light. As the sun caresses the table it brings out the deep red and gold hues in the wood. How many conversations at this table? How many cups of coffee or tea? How many stories? I watch the light move slowly across the room. The pace is slow here at the Nameless this morning. Relaxed. The atmosphere settled. Sunday morning, but really, in here, it feels like eternity - a sweet, settled eternity. Everyone here is finding their way, in their own time and season. While they patiently wait for God, they drink coffee and tea. The waitress brings plates of warm goodies. When things settle, an easy loving-kindness emerges. I look around and find nothing sacred. Then again, there is nothing ordinary here either.

God just popped up! Since I had a good connection, I took the liberty of asking that ageless question, "Who or what are you?" The Beloved's reply: "I don't know."

I wrote back, "I knew it!" and we both had a good laugh at my choice of words.

Then, silence. You know, that still, silent, warm Presence that is so...

so...

... Beloved

And For No Reason

And
For no reason
I start skipping like a child.

And
For no reason
I turn into a leaf
That is carried so high
I kiss the sun's mouth
And dissolve.

And
For no reason
A thousand birds
Choose my head for a conference table,
Start passing their
Cups of wine
And their wild songbooks all around.

And
For every reason in existence
I begin to eternally,
To eternally laugh and love!

When I turn into a leaf
And start dancing,
I run to kiss our beautiful Friend
And I dissolve in the Truth
That I Am.


Hafiz/ Trans. Ladinsky

The Treasure

O you who've gone on pilgrimage -
where are you, where, oh where?
Here, here is the Beloved!
Oh come now, come, oh come!
Your friend, he is your neighbor,
he is next to your wall -
You, erring in the desert -
what air of love is this?
If you'd see the Beloved's
form without any form -
You are the house, the master,
You are the Kaaba, you! . . .
Where is a bunch of roses,
if you would be this garden?
Where, one soul's pearly essence
when you're the Sea of God?
That's true - and yet your troubles
may turn to treasures rich -
How sad that you yourself veil
the treasure that is yours!


~Rumi 'I Am Wind, You are Fire'
Translation by Annemarie Schimmel