Duty

 

Duty

The maple leaves that turned into flame
are burning down to embers.
Time to bank the fires of the year.

I know you feel the darkness closing in,
but what makes you think that's
your problem to solve? Stop trying
to tie leaves back into branches.

Answer the questions that are yours to ask.
(Who is my neighbor?)
Make the things that are yours to make.
(Split peas or lentils in the soup?)

When the old rabbi talked about
tikkun olam - your duty
to repair the world - he made it clear.

The only way creation is restored
is through inviting the tiniest shards
to find their way back home
to a wholeness we keep trying to imagine.

Lynn Ungar, 11 Dec 23

Surrender

 

Be Ground.

Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. 

You have been stony for too many years

Try something different. 

Surrender. 

Jalaluddin Rumi

You will miss the mundane

 

I can so relate to this excerpt. I am an ardent lover of the mundane, it defines me like nothing else does. 😊 Maybe because I take nothing for granted. Every change of the light is a gift.

Jack Gilbert also expressed it so beautifully, in this poem:

"I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember."

"You'll miss the mundane walk from the post office to the store to the house--the dog greeting you; the neighbors waving; the breeze on your face. You'll miss the slow woman who disrupted your pace.

You won't know this until the walk is difficult or impossible.

There is something to loving the mundane--Thornton Wilder, I believe, dealt with this, to great and roaring cynicism. Be awake and alive and present, because this is your own great and gilded age, and it's going to slip away with brutal swiftness.

People pay small fortunes to see a whale for three seconds or an eagle fly ahead, but they race through their one and only life. I'm fairly positive that I'll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness."

Alec Guinness, Interview with James Grissom

You have more than enough. Always have.

 

Abundance

By Amy Schmidt
in memory of Mary Oliver

It's impossible to be lonely
when you're zesting an orange.

Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room 
fills with fruit.

Look around: you have
more than enough. 
Always have.

You just didn't notice
until now.

Gardening

 

For my dear friend Reena, gardener, lover of gardens, creator of beauty

"Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being, in which, as the great naturalist John Muir observed long ago, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”; a return to what is noblest, which means most natural, in us. 

There is something deeply humanizing in listening to the rustle of a newly leaved tree, in watching a bumblebee romance a blossom, in kneeling onto the carpet of soil to make a hole for a sapling, gently moving a startled earthworm or two out of the way.

Walt Whitman knew this when he weighed what makes life worth living as he convalesced from a paralytic stroke: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

Maria Popova

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature

Photo: Flower of the Cannon Ball Tree, Nagalinga Pushpa. The flowers grow out of the trunk of the tree.

The Love of your Fate

 

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. 

If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. 

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. 

Joseph Campbell, Book: Reflections on the Art of Living (I have yet to read this book)

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Audible Audiobook

It’s giving, until the giving feels like receiving

 

From 'To Begin With, The Sweetgrass'

Mary Oliver

II

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water, and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are

thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

III.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life—just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and another.

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage

 

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage.

So I sat still for three days
and God came to me.

Kabir, in 'Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West'

Belonging

 

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac (Part 3)

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.
Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

A Gift

 

The middle of June, and I awake
to rain - gentle, persistent, enough
to soak the  ground and clear  the air.
 
Isn't this the best kind of surprise-
the thing you wanted but couldn't get
for yourself and didn't know
that you could have? Already
the frogs are singing and the grass
stretches its roots in rejoicing.
 
And here am I, with my damp hair
and empty hands, and nothing to say
but "Oh!" and "Thank you!"
 
Once again the world - my one
true love - has brought me flowers.
 
Lynn Ungar, 9 Jun 2023

Joy is not made to be a crumb

 

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.

Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Mary Oliver

Walking Ahead

Am I walking a little ahead of you 

so that no snake will bite

your sandalled foot? 

John Berger

Page 44, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', 

You swell into survival

Over And Over Tune
 
You could grow into it,
that sense of living like a dog,
loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin,
able to exist only for the sake of existing.
 
Nothing inside your head lasting long enough for you to hold onto,
you watch your own thoughts leap across your own synapses and disappear --
small boats in a wind,
fliers in all that blue,
the swish of an arm backed with feathers,
a dress talking in a corner,
and then poof,
your mind clean as a dog's,
your body big as the world,
important with accident --
blood or a limp, fur and paws.
 
You swell into survival,
you take up the whole day,
you're all there is,
everything else is
not you, is every passing glint, is
shadows brought to you by wind,
passing into a bird's cheep, replaced by a
rabbit skittering across a yard,
a void you yourself fall into.
 
You could make this beautiful,
but you don't need to,
living is this fleshy side of the bone,
going on is this medicinal smell of the sun --
no dog ever tires of seeing his life
 
keep showing up at the back door
even as a rotting bone with a bad smell;
feet tottering, he dreams of it,
wakes and licks no matter what.

Ioanna Carlsen
 
(Poetry, March 2001)

You must be the thing you see

After the red Gulmohars of summer, the pink/purple/violet Bauhinias are here, announcing August.

To Look at Any Thing

To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:

To look at this green and say,
"I have seen spring in these
Woods," will not do - you must
Be the thing you see:

You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,

You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.

John Moffitt

I must be the sun

Solar

On a gray day, when the sun
has been abducted, and it’s chill
end-of-the-world weather,
I must be the sun.

I must be the one
to encourage the young
sidetracked physicist
working his father’s cash register
to come up with a law of nature
that says brain waves can change
the dismal sky.  I must be the one

to remind the ginger plant
not to rest on the reputation
of its pungent roots, but to unveil
those buttery tendrils from the other world.

When the sky is an iron lid
I must be the one to simmer
in the piquant juices of possibility,
though the ingredients are unknown
and the day begins with a yawn.

I must issue forth a warmth
without discrimination, and any guarantee
it will come back to me.

On a dark day I must be willing
to keep my disposition light,
I have to be at the very least
one stray intact ray
of local energy, one small
but critical fraction
of illumination.  Even on a day

that doesn’t look gray
but still lacks comfort or sense,
I have to be the sun,
I have to shine as if
sorry life itself depended on it.

I have to make all the difference.

Thomas Centolella

Views from along the Middle Way (yet to read)

But some bonuses, like morning

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out -- no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

William Stafford, 'The Way It Is'

We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all

We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all

But then when we started to lose one thing after another,
Each day became
A memorial day --

And then we made songs
Of great divine generosity
And of our former riches.

Anna Akhmatova, tr. Ilya Shambat

Thank you, Joanne Zeni. I first read Anna Akhmatova in my twenties. The fiery Russian poet whopassed away in 1966. It feels like something written now...

Gratitude arises from paying attention

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life

....Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s strange world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets and fully beholds all other presences. Being unappreciative, feeling distant, might mean we are simply not paying attention.

© 2015 David Whyte, from ‘Gratitude’

In Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

Photo: My Java Olive tree baby opening its eyes - pure magic! :) 

How we stand in the middle of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Relearning

The world doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to be loved. That’s how you save it.
          -Richard Brendan

And isn’t that the way it is—
the truth that opened me yesterday
now puts me in shackles. Whatever
I knew about saving the world
must be lost. Today, the only truth
is the invitation to fall in love
with the world as it is.

Fall in love with the thorn, the sting, the loss,
the ringing in the ears after the shot.
Fall in love with all I’d rather not.
Easier when it’s metaphor. Harder
when it’s wound. Hate. Anger.
Dark snarl of contempt hurled in the face.
Harder when love feels far away.

There’s only one way then to save
the world. How we stand in the middle
of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2019/06/08/relearning/  

Was there magic, and did you stop for it?

"At the end of a day, I tend to ask myself, did you contribute something beautiful to the world? Just a little beauty. And, did you live strongly and quietly today? Was there magic, and did you stop for it? Did you attend?"

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/snow