More abandon

A Bandon: Finding Liberation

I pace the edge between begin and end

beyond the tether of self created.

I am not afraid to move.

I am afraid of standing still,

utterly still in this gray silence --

this 2:00 a.m. space

where the crow has long since cawed away

the busyness of a day --

where my purpose of being

is not yet linked to memory or knowing.

Absolute stillness, before the morning dove

has begun her lament,

I am awake,

whirling in the space between --

vertigo of the soul.

East opens beyond the sun

and west, an ocean abyss,

I am direction-less.

North and south,

a fading filament.

In this center threshold,

this 2:00 a.m. space, I am

at the same time,

both leaving and left behind.

Self and other.

I desert and am deserted,

defined in my defining.

I am both form and motion,

noun and verb,

I abandon and am abandoned.

To surrender

A Bandon: Finding Fibonacci

To be in my power, I must now yield,

relinquish my claim to the all knowing,

my fight for self-reliance; I must spin

with abandon in a wildflower field,

spin like a mad child until dizzy and glowing

with emptiness and trust. I must forfeit

my ego, concede to sunflower revealed,

to swallowtail on my shoulder, fleeting.

I must lay down sovereignty and submit

                to the moral order of pinecones.

Sensual Abundance of Summer

Watermelon 

You know
what summer
tastes like-the pink flesh
of a generous earth,
this rounded life
fully ripe, fully flavored.
How could you be ashamed
at the tug of desire?
The world has opened itself to you,
season after season.
What is summer's sweetness
but an invitation to respond?
There is only one way
to eat a watermelon.
Bury your face
in the wetness
of that rosy slab
and bite.

-Lynn Ungar from Blessing the Bread 

Summer observation

An Ornamental Friendship

To stroll among them is immense:

Himalayan blue and Blood red poppies,

their stems tangled like lovers’ legs,

in fecund nearness, remembrance of ease.

And yet, such a trembling distance

as if the poverty of winter froze

their roots while the whorl of stamen

reveals black eyes, slow to apologize.

The bees’ gossipy buzz stifles

promises of garden resurrection,

one ardent opiate of spring.

Their message: summer has begun and some

cerulean petals lie still,

crumpled in jaded testicular buds,

their 7-pointed stars hanging

down toward fertile ground, as some blushing

persistent petals mark their place

in the sun, briefly, then lie flat

before falling away, uncut,

into fantasies of eternal sleep. 

In Response to JJ's paintings

Re-entry

I peer up from the bottom of the sea

and see a watercolor fantasy

through slivers of a blue moon.

“Be still in lavender streaks of sleep tonight,”

the Buddha winks.  “Tomorrow you will see.”

I’m feeling teal today,

my tongue a Phoenix flame,

a fuchsia pyre of words unspoken.

My poise of mind lost, hidden deep

like a crystal scepter in a galaxy of rage.

Once I was cut into three,

A patch of bad, a swirling orange crush.

I held on and wailed, “Don’t go.  Don’t go!”

until my burgundy heart bled black and I sunk

to the bottom of the sea.

But today I rise from an absence of color,

surface to body surf on an ocean path.

Untitled solar flares greet me.

I squint and sway to a conch shell refrain,

the sound of infinity.

The Buddha grins

because although three black squares

once divided Heaven and Earth,

today has turned metallious gold

with a boundary-less horizon.

“Look, I see you,” the Buddha laughs.

“Can you see?”  An inestimable burst,

unbound spectrum, fields of color and swirl,

 “I see you.  Can you see? That’s you

in the resplendent prisms of love and letting go.”

What lies beyond?

Beyond Time

There is a future, lined

on the back of her sundrenched hand,

but she cannot read its then or now or then.

Her time, uncharted in this emerald light

of one summer afternoon, late,

a hiatus between lavender sachets

and honeybees who settle in for long sucking

while the rope hammock sways away 

each moment to shadowed slants beyond 

beyond that poem, unfinished, there is time,

unparsed but for the comma added

then deleted or the ‘burning act’

revised to ‘bitter and burning’,

but for cuts that remain unscarred

and wine glasses never emptied. That poem balances

unwritten, never danced to bed, to climax,

that poem, her time, suspends like a champagne bubble

on crystal’s lip, never to release, never to be tongued.

A collective poem from Sitka writing workshop

Twelve Steps to Surrender at Sitka

1. 1)      First, sit under the trickster pole ~ raven atop coyote, who wraps his tail around a ceder bowl, the center of the universe. Don’t be fooled.
2. 2)      Drink deeply.  Drink slightly succulent spring beauties. Drink raindrops from roadside lupine.
3. 3)      Salute the sword fern.
4. 4)      Stitch a lichen blanket and curl up like fern fronds.
5. 5)      Speak only star-lit speeches and
6. 6)      trust the magical varnish of time.
7. 7)      Interview the maple; count her many rings.
8. 8)      Listen for the imaginary ring of the bell-shaped salal.
9. 9)      Listen again to drum beats and down pours.
10. 10)   Silence that perverse pride and
11. 11)   lightly pepper all love poems with the profane.
12. 12)   Trust the moving pen as you write through the old temple of green.

Words collected by Wendy Thompson, May 30, 2010

Manna from below

This poem reminds me of our interdependence with All.  Our hunger, our thirst, our fear of scarcity and empty bellies, empty souls require faith to be filled.

A Woman Feeding Gulls

by David Wagoner

They cry out at the sight of her and come flying
Over the tidal flats from miles away,
Sideslipping and wheeling
In sloping gray-and-white interwoven spirals
Whose center is her
And the daily bread she casts downwind on the water
While rising to spread her arms
Like wings for the calling of still more gulls around her,
Their cries intermingling at the end of daylight
With the sudden abundance
Of this bread returning after the hungry night
And the famine of morning
And the endlessly hungry opening and closing
Of wings and arms and shore and the turning sky.

Loss

"Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time, it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap, but on the contrary he keeps it empty, and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain."
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letters and Papers from Prison

Kindness

How is it one cannot trust another's kindness?  As my sister shared with me, "every human being is a combination of kind, mean, accepting and judgmental. It's called being human. Mother Teresa said something to the effect that she did what she did to make up for the Hitler in her heart! That you choose to behave kindly and keep other behaviors in check is a good thing."  Seems to me that you could trust a kind person more for protecting you from the cruelty of others and the mean-spirited thoughts in her own bleeding heart.  Wouldn't one be a greater friend by protecting you from your own cruel defensiveness?  Why wouldn't one trust that as a good thing?  I have a smart sister.  It is NEVER my intention to hurt others.

God...Need I say more?

Lenten Journey

I spent the first week of Lent looking for "answers" from Jan Richardson's Prayer Paintbook. She has since taken a break from blogging to live life: buy a house, get married, be in love. And I have not stepped up to seek my own answers. Why? Because really, it's about the question, not the answer. An answer stops the seeking then we stagnate and die. Enjoy this amazing poem from Mary Oliver about the mystery. Also, if you want another more active source for Lenten exploration, I have found www.abbeyofthearts.com to be inspiring.

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

–Mary Oliver, Evidence

my company

today was 8 kids in grades 4-6...that's it. We ventured out to PSU quad during our writing class, eavesdropping and "stalking" passersby to contribute to our character sketches. The sun shone on our number 2 pencils and none of us wanted to stop this voyeuristic game: the man with the faded jeans, drinking from a quart of chocolate milk while listening to This American Life on his iPod; the tennis player bouncing by in her short, short tennis whites thinking, "oh my gall, those kids are like so cute the way they admire me. I'm like so cute." The rocker dude in his too tight black jeans, a ring of keys clanking against his hips. Run man, run...they're gonna ticket your bike. Oh, and who can forget the Tongan wrestler flip flopping his way to his English class, Bermuda shorts hanging just low enough to "appear" cool.

We, my young writer friends, had a great day today. I didn't talk to anyone else and I don't care. There is ease in eavesdropping and ease in a life lived rightly.

Love and Let Go

Lent, when I was growing up, was a time of giving up, an abstinence from what we desire most. Now, I read that Lent is a time to open up, to let in what has been absent in our lives. Are these two different ways of being in this season? I believe not; in letting go we open the space for letting in. This is a dialectical journey. I have found it most difficult to let go of ones I love, but am always aware that my letting go, not clutching or claiming, possessing one as MY one and only, is truth in love, unconditional, free, and the love God offers us every day.

“The wise do without claiming” Tao Te Ching

Moment upon moment
love and let go

Each thought
good or bad
love and let go

Each wish
possible or not
love and let go

Each word
spoken/unspoken
love and let go

No judgment with judgment
No demands with demands
No control with control
No attachment to detachment
No “yes” without “no”

All relations
every vision
each moment
empty and full
love and let go

this is the organic flow
the ecstatic Love
of the Divine.

Lent: A time for silence and stillness

I love the little lone silence of each day,
but I am in love
with the vast silence of pure presence ~
an ocean of silence
from which rises all thoughts,
all mind, all heart,
all stories intertwined:
all life born New

In the Space Between

death comes.
Old age body
disintegrates,
teeth crumble and I spit
pieces out into a moist gray pile
in the palm of my hand.
Mouth empty,
I gum my way to the end.
A long song silent,
I rest

death comes

when I dis-
integrate
my place
my purpose
my body,
when I die
(or try to die)
in the dark corners
of living
when I give myself away,
or resist change,
clutching to old
and familiar ways.

When did you die
mother, sister
brotherhood standing by
when
did you die
crumbling
tumbling
into moist gray piles
of ash
in the palm
of their
hands?

Enter the space between,
liminal unknowing,
to discover the end
which is your beginning.
Journey the thin places,
the horizon
of fire and water
where ash meets ash
and you are alive again,
a new self.

Desert Discernment

In This Desert Night

I walk the line
between flesh and spirit,
human and divine.

I yearn to fall
either way:
into unguarded blush --
union
into unknown indigo --
union

but

Free fall
is solo.
Let it be so.

My guide, she is near
with long arms
and wide hands --
not to catch,
but to sift and slow
through fingers
like glistening sand.

My guide, she enters
ushered in,
scorching through,
a penetrating blue --
she clears the way
for light

then leaves.

My ache to enter her
-- suspended --
in the old
as if she knows
when I enter her
I am lost.

See the new self, only.
Be the new self, only.
The warm breeze
of her leaving
chills me
in this desert night
and she hands me a quilt.

I wait for my own warmth,
still --
until the heat of the morning sun
wraps me lightly
and brings me form, again

Endings are entrances into new beginnings

“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding)

Jump
Jump
Contemplation not required,
not recommended,
not desired.
Hatch out,
tumble out with unbridled ferocity

Fall
Fall
I dream of dreaming a dream of falling
Fluid, suspended falling
swallowed by cushions of air,
I float on the wake of the sky
vapors thick like honey slow my descent

I dream of dreaming a dream of falling
Lingering in the time between
the between spaces where thoughts turn inside out
where behind my eyes is emptiness - clean and pure
where all my endings become an entrance
into another beginning - a deeper recess
leagues beyond knowing

The faster I fall
the faster I fly
Am I ready?
Are we ready
for space to narrow
into a thin line of nothingness and time
to turn yellow with age and uselessness
Are we ready for free fall and grace?

I dream of dreaming a dream of falling
Falling into the soil
into the space between the web,
between the lace
I enter the white space
a new place
a new face
Jump
Jump

Lenten Letting Go

I've been reading Meister Eckhart and thinking about his most famous sermon: "The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye and one sight and one knowledge and one love." Quite Buddhist, yes? Beneath those lines (or between) is also the Buddhist concept of detachment. While I may believe I am one with God, that God is in me as I am in God, I cannot cling to that idea.

This is the first Lenten season in a long time that I walk the pathless path without a church, seek the emptiness of God without seeking:

I dreamt
that in my mother’s kitchen,
you handed me
the last piece of clay
and said,
“We’re quitting God.”
“We’re leaving this island.”
“We’re leaving you
to discover
atheism,
to discover doubt.”

and and
“We can no longer believe “We can no longer
no longer swim with you speak to you
in clear water.” with musty, gilded
words.”

Enter the loneliness of God

and
Do I
continue?
Do I
question?
Do I
resist?
Do I
wonder?
Do I
explore?
Do I
seek?
Do I
surrender?

and
where is my communion
if I sit at a table
alone?

and
do I continue
to shape this clay
in the palm of my hand?

Ash Wednesday

I experienced my first Ash Wednesday about 8 years ago and this was my response:


I am not afraid to drive in the rain
to church
with the radio and me blasting
Melissa Etheridge
I am your passion, your promise, your end.
I am not afraid to drive to church in the rain
out of ashes and darkness
into New life
and wilderness
I am not afraid to step in
to a moment of clay
shell empty
not afraid to create thick red lilies
out of playdoh
with round pure white centers
that rest against a receptive bowl

Can I not do with you
just as this potter has done?

I hold in my praying hands
the clay
and fear not.

I am not afraid to dip my fingers
in the swirling warm waters of salvation
while hips sway
and sweet vanilla oil of forgiveness
drips from my heart
I am not afraid to remember
communion
union

I burn fear and spread the ashes
a cross
my forehead
oh blue flame of eternal love
enter my heart in the place of forever
refined

I am not afraid to step out
exit prayer
enter poetry
on secular sidewalks
I wear a bold testament to faith
a scarlet “A”
unAshamed
I step out
into darkness
fearless in my knowing
that I alone
am marked
I long for a hand of friendship
as stranger’s eyes avert
as if I am disabled
handicapped by my declaration of faith

I sit through the stories of women I don’t know
women I have yet to love
and I quiver with the first gasp of fear
I am no longer home
here
I ask how am I to move with Grace
between poetry and prayer?
Only if my poetry is my prayer

Take me back to sanctuary
certain of You
and not afraid
I press my wrists to my inscribed forehead
not out of shame
but as a way to quiet my faith
and humble my love
humble as dust and ashes
I am not afraid to leave the familiar
and enter the unknown

I am not afraid to drive home in the rain
alone
and, and, and