3 posts tagged “poems”
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.- Eleanor Lerman
**
I love this poem. I love it more every time that I read it.
I still have the sea inside, from being in Fla.
It has occurred to me that moving through life, learning from life, if you have ingested your
life, then you have lots inside that will not pass away or be lost.
Love,
you have inside, and people. You have places too, and certain memories,
certain moments. It becomes a kind of a wealth and you realize that this
is eternity, not eternity as some future time and place. The eternal is
available when we step outside of time and space in recognition of God,
timelessness, love, connection -- all that binds us to one another and
to the world.
I thought about this in terms of my brothers and
sister , I thought, "Well, the things that they do and have and are good at, I don't need to do those things, because I got it through them." So what's to be jealous of? I can have surfing, the water, wealth, paralysis, suffering, joy, craftsmanship, talent, passion and the other gifts belonging to those I am bonded to. I have those experiences talents and traumas, just as I know alcoholism from my father . I don't need to become alcoholic to know it, and I don't have to fish or shoot a gun or drive a boat to feel it. The good and the bad, it works the same. So having the sea inside comes from the many hours I've spent there, the many hours my parents and siblings and ancestors visited lived and worshipped there. The sea is mine and me.I'm just making this up, but maybe its true. Or maybe it's a metaphor for what's true.
It's having the experience of thinking, "I wonder what so-and-so would think about that ?"
And
then , you know what they would think or feel or say about that, you'd
know what kind of joke that they'd tell , or what kind of sarcasm would
tinge their voice. Because you got it.
You got them.
It occurred to me when my mother died that in the last years of her life, I 'got' her. Then I realized that others in the family never got her, she never made sense to them, they , in a sense misinterpreted. So I was able to advocate for her, to take her part, to say what she would have said if she could have said anything. I knew. I felt beholden, as though it was my duty. How terrible to have no one stick up for you, no one to take your part. Did she get me? I'm not sure about that. But I do know that she strained the boundaries of her own willingness to try. She wanted to see through my eyes, she wanted to be part of me to participate with me in the world. It was difficult for her, but there it is.
It's like this other poem that I read on Whiskey River:
Remember
That to have the eyes of an artist,
That can be enough,
The ear of a poet,
That can be enough.
The soul of a human
just pointed
in the direction of the divine,
that can be more than enough.
I tell you this to remind myself.
Every gesture is an act of creation.
Even empty spaces and silence
can be the wings and voices of angels.
- Michele Linfante
**
".....in most traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. The myths of the hero, for example, are not meant to give us historical information about Prometheus or Achilles -- or for that matter, about Jesus or the Buddha. Their purpose is to compel us to act in such a way that we bring out our own heroic potential.
Karen Armstrong
**
For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid
There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot—air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.
—William Stafford
In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering "the truth" or "the meaning of life" but about living as intensely as possible here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to "get to heaven" but to discover how to be fully human--- hence the images of the perfect or enlightened man, or the deified human being. Archetypal figures such as Muhammad, the Buddah, and Jesus became icons of fulfilled humanity. God or Nirvana is not an optional extra, tacked on to our human nature. Men and women have a potential for the divine, and are not complete unless they realize it within themselves."
---Karen Armstrong
*
"We see things not as they are but as we are." John Milton
“The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
—Matthew 6:22–23
*
As we mentioned in the May 19, 2004, issue Samurai and Mustard Seeds: Fealty’s Link to Faith, “We tend to become like the thing upon which we focus: if we lead a lie, our whole self becomes a little bit more lie-like; if we feed paranoia, the world becomes one giant conspiracy.”
To very large degree, we create the world in our own image. This realization now leaves a very interesting question: if then, we wish to see the world as we ought to see it, as the honest and sincere quest after truth, beauty, and goodness would dictate, both as it is and as it yet can and shall be, how then can we have any hope—much less certainty—of seeing it clearly? On the forum recently, Sara posted about the Quakers, or the Society of Friends as they are also known, and their central tenet of “the Inner Light.” According to this principle, we, as God’s creations, have within us “that of God in everyone” which on a very basic level gives us not only life but discerns between good and evil. It reveals the presence of both in human beings, and through its guidance, offers the alternative of choice. ... [T]he Inner Light [also] opens the unity of all human beings to our consciousness. Friends believe that the potential for good, as well as evil, are latent in everyone. (Why Do We Close Our Eyes...)
In sum, this “seed of Christ” in all persons is just that: a seed. And like all seeds, it must be watered if it is to grow: it must be “activated.” This tiny mustard seed is the basis by which we first stretch forth uncertain fingers toward the kingdom of heaven; it is the basis by which we answer the gentle yet persistent knocking on the door of our hearts to open up and allow the indwelling presence of God to enter in and fill us. The emphasis, as with all true spiritual pilgrims, is placed on the relational and experiential: “first-hand knowledge of God is only possible through that which is experienced or inwardly revealed to the individual human being through the working of God’s quickening Spirit.” The answer as to how we can have any hope of seeing the world as we ought to see it is found in whether or not we nourish and water the inner knowledge that we already have. If we know we are leading a lie, we cannot very well expect to have our vision undiluted: our vision, like our life, will become increasingly lie-like. Heaven does not stock spiritual fruit, as Samurai and Mustard Seeds reminds us, but rather spiritual seeds, and we are not yet who we were created to be: we are ever becoming and the spiritual life is progressive and teleological.
The reason my spiritual vision cleared on the morning I describe, is because I longed with every ounce of my being to “see clearly.” There have been times I have asked and not received, primarily because I did not ask with my whole heart and my whole being. One has to want the good gifts of God. It seems to be almost a cosmic law that we cannot receive any more than we are willing—on the deepest level—to receive. A half-hearted request lets in a little light, because a half-hearted request does at least have some beginnings of a seedling or a sprout. A half-hearted request, however, must itself be nurtured if it is to become throaty and full-hearted. A half-hearted request is a seed, and if we are of only half a heart, then let us nourish the half that is good, and, while we cannot exactly throw the other half away, we can let it bask in the blood of its better half until it is wholly won over. Further, a whole-hearted request is always painfully aware of its baser half, hence the basis of the request. Pride, by contrast, is a spiritual killer: when we think ourselves in no danger of falling and in no need of daily nourishment, we are then far, far from seeing clearly and are liable to the grossest distortions, all the while feeling inordinately pleased with ourselves, reveling in our blindness and calling the darkness light.
So then, I was lying in bed thinking I was thinking about Gandhi, but in reality thinking about Covey, and not about Covey, but about what Covey said, “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.” And suddenly, as if in retrospect, the words of Christ as recounted in the gospels sprang to mind: “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matthew 6:22–23) or, the last sentence stated in the positive in Luke 11:36: “If therefore your whole body is full of light, with no dark part in it, it will be wholly illumined, as when the lamp [of the body] illumines you with its rays.”
[from Mr. Renaissance]
**
Summons
What would it look like?
To spread out love like a cloak over a puddle
Love offered like a lit cigarette
A warm hand
An antidote to poison,
Like a snake-bite kit
Like a last chance to drink before entering a dry country
Love the most breakable of objects
If it could be an object --
Tiny.
Fragile.
Or it’s a mustard seed
Existing in potential.
A maybe -- A maybe-not
Tossed off as as afterthought.
Not the end-all be-all at all.
But to see it as it really is
In its own light , not light reflected -
It shines;
A diamond
with no flaws or contradictions.
Without a seasonal emphasis.
With a way instead
Of saying --
'I never want to go away from you'
Even as the sea recedes.
If we think of ourselves out of nature --
Us in a window
Us under glass --
We miss that
what we see ‘out there’
Is also most intimately ‘in here.’
The weddedness of self to body
self to breath, to cell, to pulse
to the great pituitary watchtower.
Do I have enough peace in me to absorb peace?
Containing enough of the nature of peacefulness
inside me ?
Could my own essence
not have the sentinels of immunity destroy it?
Is there enough wisdom in me to attract wisdom?
Ample love, loving, loveliness
to harvest love from this world?
(June 2006)
**
"There are, then, two ways to confront or criticize another human being : with instinctive and spontaneous certainty that one is right, or with a belief that one is probably right arrived at through scrupulous self-doubting and self-examination. The first is the way of arrogance; it is the most common way of parents, spouses, teachers, and people generally in their day-to-day affairs; it is usually unsuccessful, producing more resentment than growth, and other effects that were not intended. The second is the way of humility; it is not common, requiring as it does a genuine extension of oneself; it is more likely to be successful, and it is never, in my experience, destructive."
- M. Scott Peck, *The Road Less Traveled* (Touchstone, 1978), p.152
Poulos contemplates the fullness of God:
We do ourselves a disservice if we think of, say, the onset of faith in religious truth too exclusively in terms of Big Sudden Conversion Events...We start longing for the experience of conversion, the gratifying sensation that we are surrendering ourselves completely to an insuperable power, rather than longing, say, to have been converted. This presumptive longing for the sudden, totalizing experience of comprehensiveness is, I think, a bit too driven by envy. And our longing, post-conversion, for the enduring, permanent experience of fullness is ditto too driven by pride.
*
"In the forest of estrangement" via wood_s_lotSometimes in that forest, where from afar I see and feel myself, a light breeze spreads a mist, and that mist is the dark, clear vision of the alcove where I exist in reality, among these hazy pieces of furniture and drapes and nocturnal torpor. Then the breeze subsides and the landscape of that other world returns to being completely and exclusively itself... At other times this small room is but an ashen whiff of fog on the horizon of that so different land.... And there are times when this tangible alcove is the ground we tread in that other land....(...)
The static motion of the trees; the troubled quiet of the fountains; the indefinable breathing of the saps; deep pulsing; the slow arrival of dusk, which seems not to fall over things but to come from inside them and to reach its spiritually kindred hand up to that distant sorrow (so close to our soul) of the heavens' lofty silence; the steady and futile falling of leaves, drops of estrangement in which the landscape comes to exist only in our hearing, and it becomes sad in us like a remembered homeland - all of this girded us uncertainly, like a belt coming undone.(...)
None of our yearnings has any reason to exist. Our attentive gaze is an absurdity allowed by our winged inertia.
- Fernando Pessoa,The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith
*
Mountain Spirit, leader of the Mountain Spirits, you body is holy.
By means of it, make him well again.
Make his body like your own.
Make him strong again.
He wants to get up with all of his body.
For that reason, he is performing this ceremony,
Do that which he has asked of you.
Long ago, it seems you restored someone's legs and eyes for them.
This has been said.
In the same way, make him free again from disease.
That is why I am speaking to you.-Apache poem-prayer addressed to the mountain spirits
**
[He] had been visited in all his senses: touched as by an unction on his cruel eyes that had not seen the countenance of pardon; on his inattentive ears, which had not heard the groaning of the Holy spirit; on his wild-beast nostrils, which had not perceived the fragrant odor of the divine rapture; on the sepulcher on his mouth, which had not eaten the living bread; on his violent hands, which had not helped to carry the Savior's cross; on his impatient feet, which had hastened in all directions, except towards the holy sepulcher. That word conversion, so often prostituted, if applied to him, did not altogether explain the catastrophic change.
- Leon Bloy, The Woman Who Was Poor
*
"I don't seek Truth with a capital T. For one thing, I believe that faith usually happens in much more haphazard fashion. There will always be stories of Christians who consider the arguments on both sides, like Justice weighing her scales, and then favor Christianity as most true. But for every one of these today, there are three who enter by a side door. A friend helps in a time of crisis and shows you how to pray. A local parish opens its doors at a time when you need to get warm. Perhaps even something inexplicable happens to you -- call it spiritual experience -- and it begins to make sense to explore more of that sort of thing with like-minded others. Becoming a person of faith takes a lifetime, and it begins far more often in participation than it does in some sort of judging. the French philosopher Blaise Pascal criticized the approach to faith that says it begins with belief. You start with belonging, he said. belief comes later, and even then, belief comes and goes. Consistent belief is not essential to faith.
-Jon M. Sweeney
Almost Catholic*
The creation of diamonds. A blip. The crocheting of DNA. A blip. Cross-stitch of the bilateral face. A blip. Condensation of tears from Paleozoic seas. A blip. Endurance of the strange, the doubly strange, the tiply strange particle. A blip. The time it takes to bring you past the kiss, past the coupling, past the nearly dispassionate concentration, so that time can stop. Blip. Blip. Blip.
But the nine months, the terrible twos, the childhood, adolescence, adulthood, all the elongation of growing up and its estranging inwardness, the longed for reconciliation of parent and child before death, the wait for rebirth: a these take forever.
What are you thinking now about eternal life? That it will be life eternally. And the bloody news at breakfast will continue. And the free floating anxiety will continue. And the cosmic indifference will continue. but so will nakedness with my wife, black coffee in the morning, being read Dickens by my daughter before bedtime.
What are you thinking now about eternal life? That I will shed my guilt like sodden running clothes and hear the hymn of praise beginning in my throat as the multifoliate radiance anoints my face like a stiff hot shower and blurs every memory of earth.
*
When the preacher stood before the class that day in June, 1968, and said that history was a river that God entered at will, he wished to console us for the assassinations. To comfort those who mourned. But no one seemed to understand. Perhaps no one was mourning.Perhaps he should have said that history was a freeway that God entered at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was a TV show that God interrupted at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was six periods of stone boredom five consecutive days a week and an afterschool job and a weekend of chores that God canceled at will. He said history was a river. And the only river we knew was the Los Angeles, a concrete flood channel we had never seen in flood, running alongside the freeway like a giant gutter.
And the killing that spring had occurred on people's 16th birthdays.
Behind, beyond, before and after, existing now but separately, accessible in some special instance, like prayer, but present only as a listening, present only as a signal coming from a distance, present only as a silence.
We can live eternally like that. But for the time being, we will live as we are, for as long as we can.
These are the gifts of the spirit. The belief that the body is enough. The belief that love is a god. The belief that the next world is this world perfected.
--Mark Jarman
excerpts from "History"
from the collection "Epistles"*
cross-posted to Alive On All Channels*
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