We no longer see the one who teaches us

Musician, play this moment's music as grace
for those who block our road, grace for

bandits! Musician, you learned this from
a true bandit. I hear the teacher's accent

in the student's art. Musician, turn your
face to absence, because existence is

deceitful and afraid. The soul knows it is
not from here. It feels bound in a body,

yet also knows the pleasure of absence.
Absence is the ocean we swim! Existence, a

fish hook. Anyone caught loses the joy
of freedom. Being nailed to the four

elements is a crucifixion. If you keep
running after your wishes and desires,

that's your crucifixion, be sure of it!
There is a fire in patience that burns

what of you is born to fine ash. Strike
the flint of Sura 100, Honor the one

who loses breath. And, Fire rises
where they walk. These are brave souls,

musician igniting musician. What's the
point of the chess-game world where a

pawn cuts off a king? I walk awkwardly,
but the smoke goes straight up.

Sometimes a pawn makes it to the other
side and redeems a queen. The knight

says, "Your plodding is one or two moves
for us." Judgment Day is closer than

that for everyone, one step away. The
chess king says, "Without me this motion

and figuring mean nothing. The bishop
might as well be a mosquito." Winning

and losing are the same. There's check-
mate in both. We no longer see the one

who teaches us. You could say we've
been checkmated. What happens now?


— Rumi

infinite distances

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

In the Thriving Season

In the Thriving Season
by Lisel Mueller

In memory of my mother

Now as she catches fistfuls of sun
riding down dust and air to her crib,
my first child in her first spring
stretches bare hands back to your darkness
and heals your silence, the vast hurt
of your deaf ear and mute tongue
with doves hatched in her young throat.

Now ghost-begotten infancies
are the marrow of trees and pools
and blue uprisings in the woods
spread revolution to the mind,
I can believe birth is fathered
by death, believe that she was quick
when you forgave pain and terror
and shook the fever from your blood

Now in the thriving season of love
when the bud relents into flower,
your love turned absence has turned once more,
and if my comforts fall soft as rain
on her flutters, it is because
love grows by what it remembers of love.

everything you want

"Everything you want is on the other side of fear."

— Jack Canfield

This was one of the meditations that got

my daughter through the labor and birth

of my second grandson

Henry Bennett

born February 20

as it flies

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.

— William Blake

it matters not how small

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: 

what is once done well is done forever. 

— Henry David Thoreau

photo shot by my husband on his phone

before James's 2nd birthday party

how is it that the snow

How Is It That the Snow
by Robert Haight

How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?

Some deer have stood on their hind legs
to pull the berries down.
Now they are ghosts along the path,
snow flecked with red wine stains.

This silence in the timbers.
A woodpecker on one of the trees
taps out its story,
stopping now and then in the lapse
of one white moment into another.

an inward heat

We step hastily along through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an Indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and feeling. 

Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.

— Henry David Thoreau, A Winter Walk, 1843

Luke, and Ara

Luke

by Mary Oliver

I had a dog
  who loved flowers.
     Briskly she went
         through the fields,

yet paused
   for the honeysuckle
     or the rose,
        her dark head

and her wet nose
   touching
      the face
         of every one

with its petals
  of silk,
    with its fragrance
      rising

into the air
  where the bees,
    their bodies
      heavy with pollen,

hovered—
  and easily
    she adored
      every blossom,

not in the serious,
  careful way
    that we choose
      this blossom or that blossom—

the way we praise or don’t praise—
  the way we love
    or don’t love—
      but the way

we long to be—
  that happy
    in the heaven of earth—
      that wild, that loving.

Run in Peace in your new heaven, Ara dog, 

gentle friend and companion, 

family member, just six years old.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

by Edgar Albert Guest

Gettin’ together to smile an’ rejoice,
An’ eatin’ an’ laughin’ with folks of your choice;
An’ kissin’ the girls an’ declarin’ that they
Are growin’ more beautiful day after day;
Chattin’ an’ braggin’ a bit with the men,
Buildin’ the old family circle again;
Livin’ the wholesome an’ old-fashioned cheer,
Just for awhile at the end of the year.

Greetings fly fast as we crowd through the door
And under the old roof we gather once more
Just as we did when the youngsters were small;
Mother’s a little bit grayer, that’s all.
Father’s a little bit older, but still
Ready to romp an’ to laugh with a will.
Here we are back at the table again
Tellin’ our stories as women an’ men.

Bowed are our heads for a moment in prayer;
Oh, but we’re grateful an’ glad to be there.
Home from the east land an’ home from the west,
Home with the folks that are dearest an’ best.
Out of the sham of the cities afar
We’ve come for a time to be just what we are.
Here we can talk of ourselves an’ be frank,
Forgettin’ position an’ station an’ rank.

Give me the end of the year an’ its fun
When most of the plannin’ an’ toilin’ is done;
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest,
Let me sit down with the ones I love best,
Hear the old voices still ringin’ with song,
See the old faces unblemished by wrong,
See the old table with all of its chairs
An’ I’ll put soul in my Thanksgivin’ prayers.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, Friends!

sweet solitude

Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And flew to the silence of sweet solitude.



— John Clare, "Song"

if you think

If you think you are enlightened, go home for Thanksgiving.

― Ram Dass

what is, what is not

A wheel is useful because it has emptiness at its centre,
through which an axle might pass.  

A bowl is useful because it is molded around emptiness,
waiting to be filled.  

A house is useful because of its doors and windows,
that allow people to enter and live happily.  

Therefore the 'what is' is benefited by the 'what is not'.  

Each is served by the other. 

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

in times when nothing stood

In times when nothing stood
but worsened, or grew strange,
there was one constant good:
             she did not change. 

 

— Philip Larkin, 2 March 1978

live up to the spirit

Every day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it. Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged. We uphold the law, because it is easier than to defy it. 

 

— Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, "The Immorality of Morality"

darkness restores

For / darkness restores what light cannot repair.

— Joseph Brodsky, from "On Love"

too zealously

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, 

too zealously, to make it easy for them. 

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

quickening

Out of the dimming sky a speck appeared, then another, and another. It was the starlings going to roost. They gathered deep in the distance, flock sifting into flock, and strayed towards me, transparent and whirling, like smoke. They seemed to unravel as they flew, lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein. I didn’t move; they flew directly over my head for half an hour. The flight extended like a fluttering banner, an unfurled oriflamme, in either direction as far as I could see. Each individual bird bobbed and knitted up and down in the flight at apparent random, for no known reason except that that’s how starlings fly, yet all remained perfectly spaced. The flocks each tapered at either end from a rounded middle, like an eye. Over my head I heard a sound of beaten air, like a million shook rugs, a muffled whuff. Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind.

After half an hour, the last of the stragglers had vanished into the trees. I stood with difficulty, bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty, and my spread lungs roared. My eyes pricked from the effort of trying to trace a feathered dot’s passage through a weft of limbs. Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?

— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

toe

I think this is the little piggy that went to market, and lost its way.

over and over stitch

Over and Over Stitch
by Jorie Graham

Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms
hold still for just a moment longer.
Nothing looks satisfied,
but there is no real reason to move on much further:
this isn't a bad place;
why not pretend

we wished for it?
The bushes have learned to live with their haunches.
The hydrangea is resigned
to its pale and inconclusive utterances.
Towards the end of the season
it is not bad

to have the body. To have experienced joy
as the mere lifting of hunger
is not to have known it
less. The tobacco leaves
don't mind being removed
to the long racks — all uses are astounding

to the used.
There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven —
noon, for instance, or all the single victories
of gravity, or the kudzu vine,
most delicate of manias,
which has pressed its luck

this far this season.
It shines a gloating green.
Its edges darken with impatience, a kind of wind.
Nothing again will ever be this easy, lives
being snatched up like dropped stitches, the dry stalks of daylilies
marking a stillness we can't keep.


— from Dream of the Unified Field