Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
-Edward Thomas
Thaw
Reply
Coming Home to Myself
He isn't a god afterall.
The real god is inside.
Slowly, you recognize
the illusions, the delusions,
the pain of human limitations.
Then gradually it dawns
what a huge mistake you've made.
Hold your divinity within.
Then ask yourself,
Do I love this human being?
You may find that you do;
that there's something noble in his suffering,
something noble in your own;
that you're walking parallel paths,
not holding each other up.
It's a marvelous thing.
To love another human being this way.
-unknown
Accepting This
Yes, it is true. I confess,
I have thought great thoughts,
and sung great songs-all of it
rehearsal for the majesty
of being held.
The dream is awakened
when thinking I love you
and life begins
when saying I love you
and joy moves like blood
when embracing others with love
My efforts now turn
from trying to outrun suffering
to accepting love wherever
I can find it.
Stripped of causes and plans
and things to strive for,
I have discovered everything
I could need or ask for
is right here-
in flawed abundance.
We cannot eliminate hunger,
but we can feed each other.
We cannot eliminate loneliness,
but we can hold each other.
We cannot eliminate pain,
but we can live a life
of compassion.
Ultimately,
we are small living things
awakened in the stream,
not gods who carve out rivers.
Like human fish,
we are asked to experience
meaning in the life that moves
through the gill of our heart.
There is nothing to do
and nowhere to go.
Accepting this,
we can do everything
and go anywhere.
-Mark Nepo
there are days
there are days
when the light flickers
and then i remember
i am the light
i go in and
switch it back on
-rupi kaur
The Hawthorn Tree
Side by side, not
hand in hand: I watch you
walking in the summer garden - things
that can't move
learn to see; I do not need
to chase you through
the garden; human beings leave
signs of feeling
everywhere, flowers
scattered on the dirt path, all
white and gold, some
lifted a little by
the evening wind; I do not need
to follow where you are now,
deep in the poisonous field, to know
the cause of flight, human
passion or rage: for what else
would you let drop
all you have gathered?
Louise Glück
Zombie
There you have it: zombie.
Didn't you always suspect?
'Poetry is the past
that breaks out in our hearts"
like a virus, like an infection.
How many poems about
the dead one who isn't dead,
the lost one who semi-persists,
nudging hungrily up
through the plant litter, the waste paper,
scratching against the window?
Take the once-young lover
encountered fifty years later
in the dim light of the foyer.
How blunt and smudged he is!
Mr. Potato Head
without the stick-on features:
someone you grope to remember.
Was it him who licked your neck?
And the clumsy Play-Doh monster
you made at the age of four,
then squashed in a fit of anger
so his colours ran together:
he turns up on your doorstep
on a chill November night,
with the rain whispering sushi
sushi, and the tongueless
mouth mumbling your name.
Stay dead! Stay dead! you conjure,
you who wanted the past back.
Nothing doing. The creature
ambles through the dim forest,
a red, weeping monosyllable,
a smeared word tasting of sorrow.
Now it matters and shambles
in a nimbus of dry-ice fog
down the garish overdone corridor
of Gothic clocks, into the mirror.
The hand on your shoulder. The almost-hand:
Poetry, coming to claim you.
-Margaret Atwood
from Dogfish, by Mary Oliver
You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway, it's the same old story
-
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
Invitation
Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy
and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles
for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,
or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air
as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine
and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and
gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,
do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.
It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant,
when he wrote:
You must change your life.
-Mary Oliver
blessing the boats
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
-Lucille Clifton
To Love is Not to Possess
To love is not to possess,
To own or imprison,
Nor to lose one's self in another.
Love is to join and separate,
To walk alone and together,
To find a laughing freedom
That lonely isolation does not permit.
It is finally to be able
To be who we really are
No longer clinging in childish dependency
Nor docilely living separate lives in silence,
It is to be perfectly one's self
And perfectly joined in permanent commitment
To another--and to one's inner self.
Love only endures when it moves like waves,
Receding and returning gently or passionately,
Or moving lovingly like the tide
In the moon's own predictable harmony,
Because finally, despite a child's scars
Or an adult's deepest wounds,
They are openly free to be
Who they really are--and always secretly were,
In the very core of their being
Where true and lasting love can alone abide.
-James Kavanaugh
rebirth
there will be moments when
you will bloom fully and then
wilt, only to bloom again.
if we can learn anything from
flowers it is that resilience is born
even when we feel like we are
dying.
-alex elle
My Courageous Life
My courageous life
has gone ahead
and is looking back,
calling me on.
My courageous life
has seen everything
I have been
and everything
I have not
and has
forgiven me,
day after day.
My courageous life
still wants
my company:
wants me to
understand
my life as witness
and thus
bequeath me
the way ahead.
My courageous life
has the patience
to keep teaching me,
how to invent
my own
disappearance,
and how
once gone,
to reappear again.
My courageous life
wants to stop
being ahead of me
so that it can lie
down and rest
deep inside the body
it has been
calling on.
My courageous life
wants to be
my foundation,
showing me
day after day
even against my will
how to undo myself,
how to surpass myself,
how to laugh as I go
in the face
of danger,
how to invite
the right kind
of perilous
love,
how to find
a way
to die
of generosity.
-David Whyte
Rain
Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes. Given half a chance. Yes.
-Raymond Carver
Late Fragment
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. -Raymond Carver
Be
"...Be excessively gentle with yourself..." ~John O'Donahue
LIVE
Live in the sunshine. Swim in the sea. Drink the wild air. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Coleman’s Bed
Make a nesting now, a place to which the birds can come, think of Kevin's prayerful palm holding the blackbird's egg and be the one, looking out from this place who warms interior forms into light. Feel the way the cliff at your back gives shelter to your outward view and then bring in from those horizons all discordant elements that seek a home. Be taught now, among the trees and rocks, how the discarded is woven into shelter, learn the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that far inward symmetry to all outward appearances, apprentice yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back all you sent away, be a new annunciation, make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you. See with every turning day, how each season makes a child of you again, wants you to become a seeker after rainfall and birdsong, watch now, how it weathers you to a testing in the tried and true, admonishes you with each falling leaf, to be courageous, to be something that has come through, to be the last thing you want to see before you leave the world. Above all, be alone with it all, a hiving off, a corner of silence amidst the noise, refuse to talk, even to yourself, and stay in this place until the current of the story is strong enough to float you out. Ghost then, to where others in this place have come before, under the hazel, by the ruined chapel, below the cave where Coleman slept, become the source that makes the river flow, and then the sea beyond. Live in this place as you were meant to and then, surprised by your abilities, become the ancestor of it all, the quiet, robust and blessed Saint that your future happiness will always remember. -David Whyte ...a new annunciation
I don’t know…
I don't know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely. -Sylvia Plath Accurate. Beautiful and sometimes painful, but I'll take it every single time.
Meditations in an Emergency
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There's a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart. -Cameron Awkward-Rich "Hand on my stupid heart."
Merritt Tierce from, “The End of Love”
I don’t want to meet someone so we can share a life of leisure. I do like going to the movies, I do love experiencing art and music with someone, I do enjoy hiking, I would love to have someone to cook with. But I would rather meet someone because we are running an abortion medication supply chain, or because we are joining in ecocommune in South America, or because we are building something worthwhile, growing something, teaching something, helping some people, or otherwise doing something hard together. Please let’s not play board games, let’s not get comfortable, let’s not talk about opening the relationship so our bourgeois lives can become even more prosaic. Please God don’t let’s try new restaurants.
My god, yes.
Effusive Thoughts 