The Uses of Sorrow

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(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

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Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

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It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

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~ Mary Oliver

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Thirst

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Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.  I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons.  Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell;  grant me, in your mercy, a little more time.  Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.  Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
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~ Mary Oliver


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These roses under my window

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower, there is no more; in the leafless root, there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. 

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~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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i love you much(most beautiful darling)

i love you much(most beautiful darling)


more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky


-sunlight and singing welcome your coming
although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

~ e.e.cummings

A Moment of Happiness

A moment of happiness,
you and I sitting on the verandah,
apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.

We feel the flowing water of life here,
you and I, with the garden's beauty
and the birds singing.

The stars will be watching us,
and we will show them
what it is to be a thin crescent moon.

You and I unselfed, will be together,
indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.

The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar
as we laugh together, you and I.

In one form upon this earth,
and in another form in a timeless sweet land.

~ Rumi

The Dalliance of the Eagles

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Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate divorce flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.
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~ Walt Whitman


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Archaic torso of Apollo

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We have no idea what his fantastic head
was like, where the eyeballs were slowly swelling. But
his body now is glowing like a lamp
whose inner eyes, only turned down a little,
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hold their flame, shine. If there weren't light, the curve
of the breast wouldn't blind you, and in the swerve
of the thighs a smile wouldn't keep on going
toward the place where the seeds are.
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If there weren't light, this stone would look cut off
where it drops so clearly from the shoulders,
its skin wouldn't gleam like the fur of a wild animal,
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and the body wouldn't send out light from every edge
as a star does...for there is no place at all
that isn't looking at you.  You must change your life.
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~ Rainer Maria Rilke


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Let the beauty we love be what we do

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Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.  Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.
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Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
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~ Rumi 


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from Anam Cara

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In your clay body, things are coming to expression and to light that were never known before, presences that never came to light or shape in any other individual.  To paraphrase Heidegger, who said, "Man is a shepherd of being,"   we could say, "Man is a shepherd of clay."  You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice.  Often the joy you feel does not belong to your individual biography but to the clay our of which you are formed.  At other times, you will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over a landscape.   This sorrow is dark enough to paralyze you.  It is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling.  It is more appropriate to recognize that this emotion belongs more to your clay than to your mind.  It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass; it is on its way elsewhere. Regardless of how modern we seem, we still remain ancient, sisters and brothers of the one clay.  In each of us a different part of the mystery becomes luminous.  To truly be and become yourself,  you need the ancient radiance of others.

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~ John O'Donohue

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It was among ferns I learned about eternity.

Below your belly there is a curly place.

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~ Robert Bly

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what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

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The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan,  and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention,  how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me,  what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

~ Mary Oliver



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In my sky at twilight

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In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your form and colour are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.
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The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,
the sour wine is sweeter on your lips,
oh reaper of my evening song,
how solitary dreams believe you to be mine!
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You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon's
wind, and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depth of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.
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You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of you eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin.
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~ Pablo Neruda


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don't go back to sleep

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The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

.You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

.People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

.The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

~ Rumi

I dream of a quiet man

I dream of a quiet man

who explains nothing and defends

nothing, but only knows

where the rarest wildflowers

are blooming, and who goes,

and finds that he is smiling

not by his own will.

~ Wendell Berry

you shall above all things be glad and young

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you shall above all things be glad and young

For if you're young,whatever life you wear

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it will become you;and if you are glad

whatever's living will yourself become.

Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:

i can entirely her only love

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whose any mystery makes every man's

flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

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that you should ever think, may god forbid

and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:

for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave

called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

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I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

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~ e.e.cummings

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