2 Poems for the Season

         Last Days

by Mary Oliver

Things are  changing; 
things are starting to    

     spin, snap, fly off into     
     the blue sleeve of the long  
        afternoon. 

    Oh and ooh
    come whistling
    outof the perished mouth 
    of the grass, as things

turn soft, boil back  
into substance and hue.

 As everything,   
   forgetting its own enchantment,
   whispers:      

    I too love oblivion why not 
    it is full    
      of second chances. 

Now,
hiss the bright curls of the leaves. 
Now!   
 booms the muscle
of the wind.

      A Blessing

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites us to new frontiers
To break the dead shell of yesterdays
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
                                   

 John O'Donohue

Everyday Poetry

The Barbed Heart
Takes Refuge

Found in a hidden Grove of Palos Verdes Trees

New Paintings......

Everyday Goddesses:  Green Heart (2015)

Ursula Leguin as Spider Woman Weaving the Worlds Into Being

Samhain

 GHOSTS

Where do the dead go?

The dead that are not corpses, cosmetically renewed
and boxed, their faces familiar and serene.
Or brought to an essence, pale ashes
in elegant cannisters. 

I ask for the other dead,
those ghosts that wander unshriven among our sleep,
haunting the borderlands of our lives.
The dead dreams,
The failed loves.
The quests, undertaken with full courage
and paid for in blood
that never found a dragon, a Grail, a noble ordeal
and the Hero's sacred journey home.

Instead, the wrong fork was somehow taken, or the road
wandered aimlessly, finally narrowing to a tangled gully
and the Hero was lost, in the gray and prosaic rain,
hungry, weary, to finally stop somewhere, anywhere
glad of bread, a fire, a little companionship.

Where is their graveyard?
Were they mourned?

Did we hold a wake,
bear flowers, eulogize their bright efforts
their brave hopes
and commemorate their loss with honor?
A poem?
An imperishable stone to mark their passing?

Did we give them back to the Earth
to nourish saplings yet to flower,
the unborn ones?

Or were they left to wander
in some unseen Bardo, unreleased, ungrieved.

Did we turn our backs on them unknowing,
their voices calling, whispering impotently
behind us
shadowing our steps?

1997

The Disease of Busy

"Somewhere we read, “The unexamined life is not worth living… ” How are we supposed to live, to examine, to be, to become, to be fully human when we are so busy?

.......Omid Safi

I subscribe to a wonderful series of articles and interviews, ONBEING.ORG.  Recently I read a great article by Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University, that struck a deep chord.  Judging from the hundreds of responses he got to his article, I am not alone.  I take the liberty of sharing his  article below.

I have been feeling for a long time that I need to increasingly "go dark", simplify, drop out.  I need the being here now that allows us to send down our dark taproots into the rich soil of a more contemplative life.  The "river beneath the river of the world."  One cannot get there if life is a long laundry list, if life is moving so fast that those sustaining "conversations" are reduced to Tweets.

I seem to have coffee shop Satoris.  Or used to.  As I sit here, coming up for air in the ocean of laptops surrounding me, I remember a conversation I had with an old man at Cafe Trieste.  I was much younger then, and I think I was trying to impress him.  I remember telling him about how I wanted to travel here, travel there, how all my friends were flying around the world.........and he broke my monologue with a strange comment.  He said "It's a form of greed".  I've often thought about that, with a twinge. I didn't understand him at the time,   Greed is not just an accumulation of things, it is also an excessive accumulation of stimulation and desire, and it keeps us dancing frenetically in the red shoes.  While so many beautiful and tender moments are not recognized.

It seems to me that what must be engaged in our human evolution, if there is to be any further human evolution,  is not only to deeply converse with each other,  but the Conversation now needs to include the whole world as well, the great ecology of life we participate in, the roots.  And the essence of Conversation is Listening..........so I have to ask myself, how can I, or anyone else, possibly Listen to much of anything if we are so busy, busy, busy...............

I think sometimes (as well as the author)  of a kind of  communion with my fellow humans  I crave, a communion and genuine connection that seems ever elusive in today's world.  As much as I appreciate the technology that allows me to write this on a Blog, there are so many times I also come away from the "magic box" feeling dry, brittle.  

As I sit at a table in a coffee shop, surrounded by walls of impregnable laptops, each fellow coffee drinker immersed in Cyberspace, I admit I feel like someone in a strange new world I don't really understand.  Sometimes.  I remember wistfully the days of sitting in coffee houses in Berkeley, long before personal computers.........I remember sitting there with the steam of the espresso machines rising, a book on the table maybe for camouflage, and looking around to see if there was a conversation to be had among the many conversations going on at circular marble tables around me.  How different this scene seems to me, looking back over those years.  Well, I have complained enough.  Time to see if I can change things.

 The Disease of Being Busy

 By OMID SAFI. from  ON BEING.ORG

 I saw a dear friend a few days ago. I stopped by to ask her how she was doing, how her family was. She looked up, voice lowered, and just whimpered: “I’m so busy… I am so busy… have so much going on.” Almost immediately after, I ran into another friend and asked him how he was. Again, same tone, same response: “I’m just so busy… got so much to do.” The tone was exacerbated, tired, even overwhelmed. And it’s not just adults.

When we moved to North Carolina about ten years ago, we were thrilled to be moving to a city with a great school system. We found a diverse neighborhood, filled with families. Everything felt good, felt right. After we settled in, we went to one of the friendly neighbors, asking if their daughter and our daughter could get together and play. The mother, a really lovely person, reached for her phone and pulled out the calendar function. She scrolled… and scrolled… and scrolled. She finally said: “She has a 45-minute opening two and half weeks from now. The rest of the time it’s gymnastics, piano, and voice lessons. She’s just…. so busy.”

Horribly destructive habits start early, really early. How did we end up living like this? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we do this to our children? When did we forget that we are human beings, not human doings?Whatever happened to a world in which kids get muddy, get dirty, get messy, and heavens, get bored? Do we have to love our children so much that we over schedule them, making them stressed and busy — just like us? What happened to a world in which we can sit with the people we love so much and have slow conversations about the state of our heart and soul, conversations that slowly unfold, conversations with pregnant pauses and silences that we are in no rush to fill?

How did we create a world in which we have more and more and more to do with less time for leisure, less time for reflection, less time for community, less time to just… be? Somewhere we read, “The unexamined life is not worth living… for a human.” How are we supposed to live, to examine, to be, to become, to be fully human when we are so busy? This disease of being “busy” (and let’s call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease) is spiritually destructive to our health and well being. It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most in our families, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.
Since the 1950s, we have had so many new technological innovations that we thought (or were promised) would make our lives easier, faster, simpler. Yet, we have no more “free” or leisurely time today than we did decades ago.

For some of us, the “privileged” ones, the lines between work and home have become blurred. We are on our devices. All. The. Freaking. Time.  Smart phones and laptops mean that there is no division between the office and home. When the kids are in bed, we are back online.

One of my own daily struggles is the avalanche of email. I often refer to it as my jihad against email. I am constantly buried under hundreds and hundreds of emails, and I have absolutely no idea how to make it stop. I’ve tried different techniques: only responding in the evenings, not responding over weekends, asking people to schedule more face-to-face time. They keep on coming, in volumes that are unfathomable: personal emails, business emails, hybrid emails. And people expect a response — right now. I, too, it turns out… am so busy.

The reality looks very different for others. For many, working two jobs in low-paying sectors is the only way to keep the family afloat. Twenty percent of our children are living in poverty, and too many of our parents are working minimum wage jobs just to put a roof over their head and something resembling food on the table. We are so busy.

In many Muslim cultures, when you want to ask them how they’re doing, you ask: in Arabic, Kayf haal-ik? or, in Persian, Haal-e shomaa chetoreh? How is yourhaal?  What is this haal that you inquire about? It is the transient state of one’s heart. In reality, we ask, “How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?” When I ask, “How are you?” that is really what I want to know.

Tell me you remember you are still a human being, not just a human doing. Tell me you’re more than just a machine, checking off items from your to-do list. Have that conversation, that glance, that touch. Be a healing conversation, one filled with grace and presence.  Put your hand on my arm, look me in the eye, and connect with me for one second. Tell me something about your heart, and awaken my heart. Help me remember that I too am a full and complete human being, a human being who also craves a human touch.

I don’t have any magical solutions. All I know is that we are losing the ability to live a truly human life.  We need a different relationship to work, to technology. We know what we want: a meaningful life, a sense of community, a balanced existence. It’s not just about “leaning in” or faster iPhones. We want to be truly human.

W. B. Yeats once wrote:  “It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”

How exactly are we supposed to examine the dark corners of our soul when we are so busy? How are we supposed to live the examined life?

I am always a prisoner of hope, but I wonder if we are willing to have the structural conversation necessary about how to do that, how to live like that. Somehow we need a different model of organizing our lives, our societies, our families, our communities.

I want my kids to be dirty, messy, even bored — learning to become human. I want us to have a kind of existence where we can pause, look each other in the eye, touch one another, and inquire together: Here is how my heart is doing? I am taking the time to reflect on my own existence; I am in touch enough with my own heart and soul to know how I fare, and I know how to express the state of my heart.

How is the state of your heart today?  Let us insist on a type of human-to-human connection where when one of us responds by saying, “I am just so busy,” we can follow up by saying, “I know, love. We all are. But I want to know how your heart is doing.”


OMID SAFI  is a columnist for On Being.Org .    He is Director of Duke University's Islamic Studies Center. He is the past Chair for the Study of Islam, and the current Chair for Islamic Mysticism Group at the American Academy of Religion.

She Blesses Us

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.” 

― Mary Oliver

 In 2011 I was at the White Spring in Glastonbury, where I had a profound experience of the Spirit of Place, the Numina of that ancient and sacred spring and place of Pilgrimage.  I took these forbidden  photographs of the beautiful shrine that was there, the painting that so perfectly captured the sacred essence of generosity that was there, offering, always offering.

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” 

― Mary Oliver

Black Butterflies.....Frank Polite

to stagger ashore,

free, cured of use;

simply to be, itself,

a green bottle:

a message delivered,

a sailor, like me

I don't know why this post from 2009 gets so many hits, but it does.......for some reason, lots of people seem to google "Black Butterflies".  So i felt like re-posting it.  And I still wish Frank was around to tell us more about the Black Butterflies.

9/2009

Frank Polite 1936-2005

Today I looked up a poem by Frank Polite that I've been hauling around in my box of literary treasures for some 30 years. I met Frank at the Cafe Med in Berkeley back in 1975, and he gave me the poem in person, signed even. I've hauled out his little book, "Luna Pier" many times since......."Lantern", "The Last House on Luna Pier" are old friends, travelling companions he introduced me to that day. So I was sad to learn that he died in 2005, and I never knew.  What I remember, is vividly seeing his face over a cappuchino, while on the interstate from Michigan to Toledo in 2007. I saw the turnout for Luna Pier, mythical in my mind and heart now for decades, a misty place of silent blue herons, the wounded presence of Lake Goddess Erie. Did I turn off? No.......I knew that the Luna Pier Frank seeded my imagination with was something I would never want to change.

Frank's writings have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, The Nation, Yankee, Exquisite Corpse, The North American Review and Denver Quarterly. He lived in Ohio, and for more information or to purchase some of his books, visit: FALLEN CITY WRITERS.

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

The black butterflies of night
Clipped for sleep to nightshade and widow grief,
Or in shaking luminous flight
On paired and silver wings, are rare,
And rarely seen by human sight.

Yet, they are there, surfacing
Out of range of neons and streetlights,
Preferring underleaf
And the dark offshores of air
To man and moth-maddening glare of things.
Tonight, As crisis after crisis
Cracks our skies like lightning,
I think of death,
Of different ways of dying,
And of Egypt and the myth
That once held black butterflies
Sacred to Isis.

They lived forever in flight
In her private groves, compelled like
Flickering minutes
Never to touch leaf nor stone,
Never to rest, except upon her nakedness
When she turned to love.
And here is death to be envied;
To be crushed to a personal breast
Between goddess
And whatever bird, beast, lover
Fell to her lips.
We are something else. . .

Myth and love will miss us
When the night is suddenly turned on,
Turned blank white,
And the black butterflies
Appear against that vellum sky
As far, flitting, burnt-out stars.

GOOD ADVICE

1

Do not rush to be disappointed with yourself.
Rather, make a world drag you to it
behind 24 mules of irrefutable proof, & you
still digging in your heels all the way
before you say, "I'm disappointed with myself."

2

Trust only inauspicious beginnings,
the modest seed. What comes
dancing toward you tossing flowers,
soon perishes.

3

It is the weed of life
that grips the garden to your need,
that roots you deep into its soil
which is immortal.


LUNA PIER

A sea change leans against the pier
in tumult. I know why I'm here.
Cold streams, contending with the warm
grip the rocks as never before
in my life, and hurl up salt at my door.
What drifts in now is mine, cut loose,
thrown overboard, or drowned:
a wooden spar, a beached bone, a yard
of torn sail like an indecipherable
parchment. Even a shoe drifts in, kicked
around out there God knows how long.

I listen now. I witness. I do not
touch or twist at the integrity of each
survival. It is enough to have arrived
at all, embodying sea changes;
to stagger ashore, free, cured of use;

simply to be, itself, a green bottle,
a message delivered,
a sailor, like me.


LANTERN

Next year I'm forty years old.
I don't know what hump I'm over.
To have made it this far, what
does that mean? Where am I?

Where have I been? Like you,
I've been places, New York, Asia,
Great fields uncut by wire
or river, mountains leaping up.

And O yes, oceans. I felt my way
deeply into each, into the mind
shafts permitted me, into
a flower (perfect on mescaline,

I laughed and wept for hours)
into the tenderness of people...
I've loved, worshipped stones,
written poems to moon and stars,

and depending on the deep and dark
of my downheartedness, I lit
a flame in my forehead like a toad,
imagining myself, at various

times, Lord of Earth, Light in
the forest, even...God.
Down the road with my lantern, I
lifted up the broken, the poor,

the ignorant, the hopeless, only
to come down to this: to be all of
them myself, at once. So what's
it all about? I don't ask anymore:

I am one with the insect and cloud.
I beg my life to lay me down at last
gently if possible, or fast, the way
a horse, plunging into darkness

kicks a stone out of its path.