Uttama – Great Woman
For years I couldn’t sleep.
Most nights I’d throw off the covers and take long runs through the dark.
Nothing helped.
My sisters, when sleepless nights come to tear you into little pieces,
rise to meet the day as a tree rises to meet the axe–
as a scalp bows to meet the blade–
as sparks from a dying fire reach out to meet the darkness–
as all of our bones someday fall softly down to meet earth.
When you stand, send your roots down between the stones.
When you walk, walk like a skeleton walking to its grave.
When you lie down, lie down like a blown-out candle being put back in a drawer.
When you sit, sit very very still.
My sisters, sit like you are dead already.
How could this world possibly give you
what you’re looking for when it’s so busy falling apart–just like you?
Look closely. Don’t move until you see it.
from the book “The first free women – poems of the early Buddhist nuns” translated by Matty Weingast
We were once enwombed in the earth
and the silence of the body
remembers that dark,
inner longing.
Fashioned from clay,
we carry the memory of the earth.
Ancient, forgotten things
stir within our hearts,
memories from the time
before the mind was born.
Within us are the depths
that keep watch.
~John O’ Donohue from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
THIS IMPERFECT DANCE
We never rehearsed this
We are a mess
We tremble and perspire
We step on each other’s toes
Sometimes we go out of tune
And forget our lines
But at least this is real
At least we are not half-alive
Buried under the weight of some image
We never believed in anyway
I will always take this imperfect dance
Over no dance at all
– Jeff Foster
Bugs in a Bowl
Han Shan, that great and crazy, wonder-filled
Chinese poet of a thousand years ago, said:
We’re just like bugs in a bowl.
All day going around
never leaving their bowl.
I say, That’s right! Every day
climbing up the steep sides,
sliding back. Over and over again.
Around and around.
Up and back down.
Sit in the bottom of the bowl,
head in your hands, cry, moan,
feel sorry for yourself.
Or.
Look around.
See your fellow bugs.
Walk around. Say,
Hey, how you doin’?
Say, Nice bowl!
David Budbill
Like Spring, secretly at work within the heart of Winter,
below the surface of our lives
huge changes are in fermentation.
We never suspect a thing.
Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality
begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable
to a flourish of possibility
and we are suddenly negotiating
the challenges of a threshold…
At any time you can ask yourself:
At which threshold am I now standing?
At this time in my life, what am I leaving?
Where am I about to enter?
A threshold is not a simple boundary;
it is a frontier that divides
two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres.
Indeed, it is a lovely testimony
to the fullness and integrity
of an experience or a stage of life
that it intensifies toward the end
into a real frontier that cannot be crossed
without the heart being passionately engaged
and woken up.
At this threshold, a great complexity of emotion comes alive:
confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope.
This is one of the reasons such vital crossings
were always clothed in ritual.
It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize
and acknowledge the key thresholds;
to take your time;
to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there;
to listen inward with complete attention
until you hear the inner voice calling you forward:
“The time has come to cross.”
John O’Donohue
Funny
What’s it like to be a human
the bird asked
I myself don’t know
it’s being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity
being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity
being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful
being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat
breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly
it’s being on fire
with a nest made of ashes
eating bread
while filling up on hunger
it’s dying without love
it’s loving through death
That’s funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air
~ Anna Kamienska ~
______________________________________________________________________________
Have patience with everything
that remains unsolved in your heart.
Try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms
and like books written in a foreign language.
Do not now look for the answers.
They cannot now be given to you
because you could not live them.
It is a question of experiencing everything.
At present you need to live the question.
Perhaps you will gradually,
without even noticing it,
find yourself experiencing the answer,
some distant day.
Rilke Letters to a Young Poet
The World I Live In
I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?
You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.
Mary Oliver
Now
we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It
would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen
in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those
who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What
I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about…
If
we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.
Now
I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
Pablo Neruda
Wild Love
Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness
Give me your hand.
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy)
What’s In The Temple?
In
the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring.
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about.
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable.
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to
follow.
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing.
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth.
If she stands still it will catch up with her.
Pause with us here a while.
Put your ear to the wall of your heart.
Listen for the whisper of knowing there.
Love will touch you if you are very still.
If
I say the word God, people run away.
They’ve been frightened–sat on ’till the spirit cried “uncle.”
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can’t name.
They know he’s out there looking for them, and they want to be found,
But there is all this stuff in the way.
I
can’t talk about God and make any sense,
And I can’t not talk about God and make any sense.
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God.
I
miss the old temples where you could hang out with God.
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur,
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death.
You see there the consequences of carelessness,
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived.
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh.
We
don’t build many temples anymore.
Maybe we learned that the sacred can’t be contained.
Or maybe it can’t be sustained inside a building.
Buildings crumble.
It’s the spirit that lives on.
If
you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
What would you worship there?
What would you bring to sacrifice?
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?
Go there now.
~ Tom Barrett ~
And the people stayed home.
And read books,
and listened,
and rested,
and exercised,
and made art,
and played games,
and learned new ways of being,
and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated,
some prayed,
some danced.
Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant,
dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed,
and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses,
and made new choices,
and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live
and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.
~Kitty O’Meara’~
Early
in the morning we crossed the ghat,
where fires were still smoldering,
and gazed, with our Western minds, into the Ganges.
A woman was standing in the river up to her waist;
she was lifting handfuls of water and spilling it
over her body, slowly and many times,
as if until there came some moment
of inner satisfaction between her own life and the river’s.
Then she dipped a vessel she had brought with her
and carried it filled with water back across the ghat,
no doubt to refresh some shrine near where she lives,
for this is the holy city of Shiva, maker
of the world, and this is his river.
I can’t say much more, except that it all happened
in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt
like that bliss of a certainty and a life lived
in accordance with that certainty.
I must remember this, I thought, as we fly back
to America.
Pray God I remember this.
Mary Oliver
Having Come This Far by James Broughton
I’ve been through what my through was to be
I did what I could and couldn’t
I was never sure how I would get there
I nourished an ardor for thresholds
for stepping stones and for ladders
I discovered detour and ditch
I swam in the high tides of greed
I built sandcastles to house my dreams
I survived the sunburns of love
No longer do I hunt for targets
I’ve climbed all the summits I need to
and I’ve eaten my share of lotus
Now I give praise and thanks
for what could not be avoided
and for every foolhardy choice
I cherish my wounds and their cures
and the sweet enervations of bliss
My book is an open life
I wave goodbye to the absolutes
and send my regards to infinity
I’d rather be blithe than correct
Until something transcendent turns up
I splash in my poetry puddle
and try to keep God amused.
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
________________________________________________________________________
Prescription for the Disillusioned
Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud your vision.
Leave behind the stories of your life.
Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty,
the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you,
new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.
– Rebecca del Rio
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
The Secret
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
~ Denise Levertov ~
Primary Wonder
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
~ Denise Levertov ~
On Why I Must Decline To Receive The Prayers
You Say You Are Constantly Sending
Because first of all, I have a feeling that they didn’t cost you anything,
and so I have to wonder: What is their actual market value?
For you, is the prayer like a radar-guided projectile
mounted on the hinged-together wings of several good intentions,
propelled by the flawed translation of a Rumi poem?
Anyway, my mailbox is already pretty much occupied for the season.
At the beginning of May a big mother wren started moving in,
one mouthful of straw and twig at a time.
For three days she flew in and out, in and out and in,
building a nest the size of a small soup bowl.
Then she sat on her eggs for two weeks, cooing and fluffing to keep them warm.
Then she was busy feeding her young.
I think the heat passing through that mother’s body into her brood
has already surpassed the endoplasmic vibrational voltage
you’ve mentioned as a feature of the prayers you are sending me.
I understand that you are doing your best
to hoist yourself up toward a spiritual life,
even if it is through the doorway of a kind of pretending.
But if you really care, as you claim, please
will you kindly sit down and work your shit out?
Stop stealing reality from the world
and replacing it with make-believe!
The newspaper says that poorly aimed prayers
are causing flat tires on I-25.
The sandalwood incense blowing across the valley
is already causing cab drivers a lot of allergies.
So sit still and just look at the colors of the changing sky.
And could you stop burning so many candles, please?
My god, think how many hours and hours and hours —
think of how hard those bees worked
to make all that wax!
Tony Hoagland
Today
The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.
And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars.
~ William Stafford ~
Enter at Your Own Risk
I have reached the northwest,
the transformation point.
Greetings from the brink of life
where messages of impermanence
are carved into a jagged edge
and the wonder of each moment
is the only daily news.
I am an ice cube melting into the one,
an ocean where surrender
is more than a concept
and the mystery glows permeable.
I hold a container
for metamorphosis by osmosis.
This space is a tunnel, a pass through
with no end zone,
a catalytic holding tank
that strips away every excess trapping.
An arrival and departure zone
where we lift off together
on a runway to destiny.
A floor we can die into
and be re-born from
as we dance hardy wings onto our souls.
bella
11-14-18
Half Moon Bay
The great affair,
the love affair with life,
is to live as variously as possible,
to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred,
climb aboard and gallop over the thick sun-struck hills every day.
Where there is no risk,
the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding.
And despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles and detours,
life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography,
only a length.
It began in mystery and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
~ Diane Ackerman ~
(“found poetry” from A Natural History of the Senses)
If You Want Me
You must approach
Quietly as a doe
To the river for her evening drink
You must be slow as the ripening of wood
The patience of a village of weavers
Bringing into being one perfect carpet
If you touch me
All the tenderness
Of fathers watching birth
Must pass through your hands
And you must enter softly
As one day slips on into the next
Through a long summer of sunny afternoons
If I cry, if my sorrow is not more dear
Than oceans of dolphins on the orange morning waves
If you will not lavish me until my body
Like a dying fish, gives up
And I swim like I have flown in my dreams
If you are saving something
If you have not made up your mind
Do not come to me
For I have been wounded
I am a lioness, I am
No longer young.
Ellen Bass
Eulogy to a Uterus
Bleeding I emerged from the womb
Bleeding I blossomed into woman
Bleeding two babes were birthed
Bleeding stopped sans fanfare
Bleeding I discovered with alarm,
a signal from the deep end of life,
this heaviness in my belly
echoing the bleeding since time began.
For I have been a womb walker:
mothering, nurturing, caring, holding.
Instinct woven into the tapestry of my cells,
this love and labor of tending:
gardens, children, bodies, communities.
This bleeding womb soaks the earth
in painted spirals of creation and cultivation,
a ceaseless succession of pregnancy and birth,
as if space, emptiness, pause
were dreadful notions, never an option
and the capable and good girl that I am
must always earn her place in the cosmos,
as if simply existing would never suffice.
Maybe this subtext assumption
penned over a long lifetime
is up for grabs, looking a bit suspicious.
There are cracks in the silver platter
and actually, when the light is just right,
all this doing? A bit ridiculous,
a bit presumptuous, a bit over reaching.
And yet, I hold this worn life nugget,
its facets catch that just right light
and it sparkles sublime in perfection.
My hands extend to embrace the world,
I pulse, a well-used servant of the heart
and lord willing, may my last breath
be one of aching contentment
and sweet fiery love.
bella 10-27-18
After a sleepless night, worrying about the world
I stand in the whispering grass,
watching the mountains crouch
under their burden of sky.
The morning sun glides above the peaks
and the field is suddenly flooded
with turquoise light. A flock of red wings rise,
they turn together like a page of poetry.
I read between the lines
realize I am lonely, and afraid.
I worry about the wars, the weather,
the end of our beautiful, broken world.
I see the way we can harden our hearts
when fear is what moves us.
Now a marsh hawk cruises the yellow reeds, she dives swiftly
and some soft-furred creature’s life is over.
For each of us, hauling our basket of dreams,
it is only one breath, one breath,
that divides this world, and the next.
What is there to do then but give thanks,
Offer praise and gratitude for the sweetness we’re allotted,
Fling open our burning hearts, and help each other.
–Elaine Sutton
The House of Belonging
I awoke this morning in the gold light
turning this way and that
thinking for a moment
it was one day like any other.
But the veil had gone
from my darkened heart
and I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight that filled my room,
it must have been
the first easy rhythm
with which I breathed myself to sleep,
it must have been the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness of the night.
And I thought this is the good day
you could meet your love,
this is the black day
someone close to you could die.
This is the day you realize
how easily the thread is broken
between this world and the next.
And I found myself sitting up
in the quiet pathway of light,
the tawny close grained cedar
burning round me like a fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending through the first
roof of light the sun has made.
This is the bright home in which I live,
this is where I ask my friends to come,
this is where I want to love all the things
it has taken me so long to learn to love.
This is the temple of my adult aloneness
and I belong to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
– David Whyte
Hokusai Says by Robert Keyes
Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing
He says look forward to getting old.
He says keep changing, you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself as long as it’s interesting.
He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient, every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.
He says everything is alive –
shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees.
Wood is alive.
Water is alive
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
He says live with the world inside you.
He says it doesn’t matter if you draw, or write books.
It doesn’t matter if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home and stare at the ants on your verandah
or the shadows of the trees and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.
Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength is life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.
He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.
I feel vulnerable when my well-being is in jeopardy:
my physical body is precious and I am exposed:
turbulence in flight, choppy water, traffic blips,
nights home alone, dark empty streets.
In my nebulous girlhood primeval
my physical welfare was not guaranteed;
my emotional safety was non-existent.
Rigidity and tension are my twin saviors.
Steep though their cost may be,
I learn how to erect walls.
I feel vulnerable when I am not busy,
time is of the essence and I am exposed
as unimportant if I rest, gaze, sit.
Productivity, efficiency, fruits of labor!
Though I can fall into numbness
in more ways than one.
My father said the lazy man works twice as hard
and my mom was always impatient.
They were born first generation:
driven struggle, diligent producing,
I got straight A’s.
I feel vulnerable when I try to speak what I feel,
someone is listening and I am exposed,
the only person alive who does not know.
I must be stupid, close-hearted, hard-hearted.
Put on the spot generates internal confusion
that dives elusive feelings ever deeper.
Well who didn’t have an insecure childhood?
Never OK to reveal the frightening truth
or threats that remain nameless.
In the face of upheaval and shambles,
I learned how to slip out the back jack.
I perfect my invisibility cloak.
I feel vulnerable when I lose stuff,
I’m devastated, rejected, exposed.
I lose keys, friends, vital bits of information.
Phones, water bottles and students abandon me.
I lose my sister, my brother, my mother.
Getting a grip, clinging for all I’m worth
morphs into an elusive full time stranglehold.
Things have been slipping away as long
as I can remember.
I fine-tune how to hold on.
I feel vulnerable when I ask for help,
someone is judging and I am exposed
as less than competent,
less than all together,
so clearly less than perfect.
Taking charge becomes the ideal antidote,
creates that early safe haven I still long for.
Instead there was relentless uncertainty
where the caress of a soft supporting hand
was simply out of the question.
I pretend to be OK a lot.
I know what it means to be out there defensive…
life force consumed by hiding, blame, deception.
I know what it means to be out there free…
patient, transparent, graceful, humble.
I surrender to showing up unbuttoned.
My awkward clumsy lack of poise self,
my stories of a life gone awry…
my own outing, I offer as my gift to the world
because it is true and universal and
funny and pathetic and mortal.
Time is a wasting on make-believe and pretense.
I feel vulnerable when I am being human.
Hardcore Vulnerability: Sacramento March 2-4, 2018
Bella 3-7-18
Start Close In
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.
Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.
To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.
Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.
Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
David Whyte
_________________________________________________________
Praise What Comes
surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise
talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps
you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,
finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another
ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?
~ Jeanne Lohmann ~
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains
i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing
winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
~ e.e.cummings ~
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 heiroglyphs 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.
Pesha Gertler
Housing Shortage
I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
and to think softly
and to breathe shallowly
in my portion of air
and to disturb no one.
Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
that I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
all over and invading; I clutter this place.
with all the apparatus of living.
You stumble over it daily.
And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.
Excuse me for living,
but, since I am living,
given inches, I take yards,
taking yards, dream of miles,
and a landscape, unbounded
and vast in abandon.
You too dreaming the same.
Naomi Replansky
I am and I know…
Golden marguerites sit me tall,
faces yearning toward
the last seasonal sun drops
even as a menacing dim looms real.
The water moves relentless
under Half Dome’s sheer mass,
anchors me to these buff cool pebbles
that grind my feet into presence.
I am a recovering do-er…
I am an exhausted thinker…
Among the random things I know
is that I am, although that is
just another thought, holding zero value,
as is the fate of all thinking.
Here in the shadow of granite silence,
witnessed by simplicity,
the doing and the thinking haunt me:
looping whines and circular demands,
scraping away at my dwindling time,
the whole charade hysterical
whenever I cease to despair
and wake up to remember
I stand alive with forest pine
knowing that I am and that is plenty.
bella 10-19-17
A Necessary Autumn
You and I have spoken all these words, but as for the way
we have to go, words
are no preparation. There is no getting ready, other than
grace. My faults
have stayed hidden. One might call that a preparation!
I have one small drop
of knowing in my soul. Let it dissolve in your ocean.
There are so many threats to it.
Inside each of us, there’s continual autumn. Our leaves
fall and are blown out
over the water. A raven sits in the blackened limbs and talks
about what’s gone. Then
your generosity returns: spring, moisture, intelligence, the
scent of hyacinth and rose
and cypress. Joseph is back! And if you don’t feel in
yourself the freshness of
Joseph, be Jacob! Weep and then smile. Don’t pretend to know
something you haven’t experienced.
There’s a necessary dying, and then Jesus is breathing again.
Very little grows on jagged
rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up
where you are. You’ve been
stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.
Rumi
Self Portrait
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned,
if you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you,
if you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.
I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day,
with the consequence of love
and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat.
I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.
David Whyte
___________________________________________________
Oriah Mountain Dreamer took a writing class from David Whyte and the instruction was to write her own personal version of this poem. Here it is:
The Invitation
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain,
mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy,
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic,
remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day.
And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure,
yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
________________________________________________
Nothing
Nothing sings in our bodies
like breath in a flute.
It dwells in the drum.
I hear it now
that slow beat
like when a voice said to the dark,
let there be light,
let there be ocean
and blue fish
born of nothing
and they were there.
I turn back to bed.
The man there is breathing.
I touch him
with hands already owned by another world
Look, they are desert,
they are rust. They have washed the dead.
They have washed the just born.
They are open.
They offer nothing.
Take it.
Take nothing from me.
There is still a little life
left inside this body,
a little wildness here
and mercy
and it is the emptiness
we love, touch, enter in one another
and try to fill.
~ Linda Hogan ~
When They Sleep
All people are children when they sleep.
there’s no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
– God, teach me the language of sleep.
Rolf Jacobsen
_____________________________________________________________
Indigenous Grandmothers Surround Me
There are old women who come to you at night when you are sleeping, when you are awake, when you are relaxed and have stopped “trying” to make something happen.
When you have surrendered your grasping, clawing, survival and give yourself over to rest to allow to let go and just be soft, breathing, open fertile emptiness.
And then, when you are in that place of allowing, they can reach you they sit around you always talking softly around the fire of your light.
They chew on roots, leaves, your words spoken in brusque, harshness They eat Fear that oozes out your pores.
They laugh and pour tea and always always they Listen and chant into your ear, soothing down the voices that would make you small and less than.
They are there, always there whittling away on the debris that covers your soul, tending you holding you planting you... though you try your best to pull the roots and block the shoots.
They wait, silent, mindful, knowing. In Pure Trust. They sit inches from you, offering you the true bread, waiting my love, smelling your blossom before it has bloomed.
Deborah Gutierrez
IF YOU KNEW
By Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
It was Rumi who said “If you only say one prayer in a day, make it thank you.” I love this poem by Elaine Sutton:
After a sleepless night, worrying about the world
I stand in the whispering grass,
watching the mountains crouch
under their burden of sky.
The morning sun glides above the peaks
and the field is suddenly flooded
with turquoise light. A flock of red wings rise,
they turn together like a page of poetry.
I read between the lines
realize I am lonely, and afraid.
I worry about the wars, the weather,
the end of our beautiful, broken world.
I see the way we can harden our hearts
when fear is what moves us.
Now a marsh hawk cruises the yellow reeds, she dives swiftly
and some soft-furred creature’s life is over.
For each of us, hauling our basket of dreams,
it is only one breath, one breath,
that divides this world, and the next.
What is there to do then but give thanks,
Offer praise and gratitude for the sweetness we’re allotted,
Fling open our burning hearts, and help each other.
Prescription for the Disillusioned
Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud your vision.
Leave behind the stories of your life.
Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty,
the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you,
new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.
– Rebecca del Rio
Halleluiah
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
~ Mary Oliver ~
~ Clearing ~
Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life
and wait there patiently,
until the song that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.
Martha Postlewaite
_________________________________________
Prayer
May I never not be frisky,
May I never not be risqué.
May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean,
leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving movement,
still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.
~ Mary Oliver ~
___________________________________________
Trough
There is a trough in waves,
A low spot
Where horizon disappears
And only sky
And water
Are our company.
And there we lose our way
Unless
We rest, knowing the wave will bring us
To its crest again.
There we may drown
If we let fear
Hold us within its grip and shake us
Side to side,
And leave us flailing, torn, disoriented.
But if we rest there
In the trough,
Are silent,
Being with
The low part of the wave,
Keeping
Our energy and
Noticing the shape of things,
The flow,
Then time alone
Will bring us to another
Place
Where we can see
Horizon, see the land again,
Regain our sense
Of where
We are,
And where we need to swim.
~ Judy Brown ~
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver
On the Ridge
We can grow by simply listening,
the way the tree on
that ridge listens its branches
to the sky, the way blood
listens its flow to the site
of a wound, the way you
listen like a basin when
my head so full of grief
can’t look you in the eye.
We can listen our way out
of anger, if we let the heart
soften the wolf we keep inside.
We can last by listening
deeply, the way roots reach for
the next inch of earth, the way
an old turtle listens all he hears
into the pattern of his shell.
Mark Nepo
_______________________________________________________
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.
~ Ranier Maria Rilke ~
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
I’m releasing:
my body as indispensable
the limits of my heart’s capacity
the notion I’m losing my mind
attachment to a guaranteed next breath
my ancestor’s fear and shame
the pull to distraction
belief my body cannot heal
my beloved from the need to change
my judgments about 1,000 things
the seduction of isolation
life in the fast lane
the jaws of perfection
the earth from fixing this mess
my children to live as they will
my need to know
bella 10-28-15
To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but …
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?
~ Gregory Orr ~
A Necessary Autumn
…I have one small drop
of knowing in my soul. Let it dissolve in your ocean.
There are so many threats to it.
Inside each of us, there’s continual autumn. Our leaves
fall and are blown out
over the water. A raven sits in the blackened limbs and talks
about what’s gone. Then
your generosity returns: spring, moisture, intelligence, the
scent of hyacinth and rose
and cypress…
There’s a necessary dying, and then Jesus is breathing again.
Very little grows on jagged
rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up
where you are. You’ve been
stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.
Rumi
~~The Thing About Fear~~
We try to avoid it, distracting ourselves,
even put others in the way. Because it
makes what is necessary seem monumental.
It makes what is needed seem uncrossable.
Yet when we stumble over the line, or are
loved over the line, or, in our exhaustion,
fall beyond our pain, what we feared
was a fall to our death turns out
to have been the next step.
~Mark Nepo~
Forget about enlightenment.
Sit down and listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing,
and the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now.
Not who you’d like to be,
but the being right here before you,
inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You’re already more than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, look in, let go.
John Welwood
Memorial Day
Grandpa was conscripted by the czar,
marched to the battle beat before
desperately herding his fledglings
to the dream shore of America.
My father was a bombardier
loyally perched in the womb of a P-38
gunning the faceless to kingdom come,
burning visions haunt his bedroom still.
Me? I sat silent in slick university halls,
paraded in hope-filled San Francisco streets
outraged at senseless carnage déjà vu,
my high school heart-throb stolen.
Now Memorial Day transpires once more
and I remember the sacrifice of youth and
the ancient lineage of wounded fathers passing
this mortal legacy through time immemorial.
In a world where drones fly and grandmothers cry
where collateral damage parades as logic
and home security trumps daily sanity,
we pray for peace, instead of fighting for it.
bella May 26, 2013
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding