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