Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
~David Whyte, “Enough” Where Many Rivers Meet
Notes: Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Vadim Stein via Mennyfox55
Waking up in the morning
I vow with all beings
to be ready for sparks…
I vow with all beings
to let the pain and surprise
slow me down to this step,
this step.
~Robert Aitken, from “Zen Vows for Daily Life”
Notes:
But mostly I live here in the capricious present
Writing down one thing, then the next.
Autumn passes like empty freight cars—
Some doors open, some doors closed—
Light flickers and flashes through the cracks.
The trees are a thousand species of fires.
— Eric Pankey, from “Southern Elegy,” Trace: Poems
Notes:
What is silence?
Something of the sky in us.
~ Ilya Kaminsky, from “Deaf Republic: 1,” Poetry
Notes: Poem – The Vale of the Soulmaking. Photo: John White with Blue Sky with small clouds (Eyre Peninsula, Port Lincoln, South Australia, Australia)
When the night slides under with the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
and the heron glides tipping heavy wings in the river,
when crows stir and cry out their harsh joy,
and swift creatures of the night run toward their burrows,
and the deer raises her head and sniffs the freshening air,
and the shadows grow more distinct and then shorten,
then we rise into the day still clean as new snow.
The cat washes its paw and greets the day with gratitude.
Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted like a perfect toy…
We are given the wind within us, the breath
to shape into words that steal time…
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.
We are lent for a time these minerals in water
and a morning every day, a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, our throats,
our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues…
We are given passion to rise
like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.
We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all
of one flesh with us, see under the trash, through
the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us…
Let silence still us so you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.
~ Marge Piercy, from “Nishmat in “Available Light
Notes: Poem – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: Marta Navarro
“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
~ Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Photo: Nacia Photography
I’m medicated. Two doses of NyQuil overnight, followed by a single dose of DayQuil. Smooth gel tablets roll in my palms. Floating. Is this Nepo’s half-wakeful state? Is this place the other name for Heaven?
Thursday. 7:30 am. Late jump. Traffic is flowing smoothly.
Head cold, congestion, body aches. Mucus draining in throat. What’s that smell of rot? Breath sweeter than a Honey Badger.
Day 3, no relief on horizon.
I tried to bow out of this speaking engagement earlier, you know, with that excuse of an important client meeting that conflicts on your calendar. Just couldn’t do it.
And to cancel now? At the last minute? Don’t feel well. Have the flu. Sorry. And leave them hanging with an empty 30 minute slot in a full day event planned months earlier. No, no, no. A burden too heavy to carry.
So, I begged down the engagement and they agreed. I’ll take 30 minutes of Q&A “on any topic.” [Read more…]
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever
~ Mary Oliver, from “One or Two Things” in New and Selected Poems: Volume One
Notes:
“I like things I can see as much as things I can’t (see)…that inner light was drawing me in.”
It was an innocuous line by Murakami in Killing Commendatore, but for some reason I couldn’t, I can’t, let it go.
And then it’s Baader-Meinhof. You are shopping for a new car, you fall in love with a particular model, and then suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. But the what is what I can’t see.
Murakami is followed by a passage I read by Immanuel Kant:
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
And it’s early Saturday morning. Light rain.
I’m in bed, it’s dark out. The body is spent from the week. The Mind is off on its own, its finger tips touching, exploring, wandering, free, weightless. [Read more…]
Angels are wonderful but they are so, well, aloof.
It’s what I sense in the mud and the roots of the
trees, or the well, or the barn, or the rock with
its citron map of lichen that halts my feet and
makes my eyes flare, feeling the presence of some
spirit, some small god, who abides there.
If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing
continuously.
I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this
holiness, which is why I’m so often late coming
back from wherever I went.
Forgive me.
~ Mary Oliver, “Forgive Me” in Blue Horses
Sources: Poem – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo – Lichen by Mathieu Noël
