Only by living completely in the world can on learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself - even to make of oneself a righteous person.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Saturday, June 09, 2007
q
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Crowfoot (a Blackfoot Indian) 1821-1890
p
WHAT HAVE I LEARNED
What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?
The moments
between hard pleasant tasks
To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.
-the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs
to Gen.
Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,
you pass it on.
p
WHAT HAVE I LEARNED
What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?
The moments
between hard pleasant tasks
To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.
-the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs
to Gen.
Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,
you pass it on.
p
Daily
These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out
This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky
This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
p
A Map to the Next World
In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map
for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.
My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields,
from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.
The map must be of sand and can
It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
In the legend are instructions on the language of the land,
how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.
Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money.
They best describe the detour from grace.
Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; a fog steals our children while we sleep.
Flowers of rage spring up in the depression, the monsters are born there of nuclear anger.
Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.
We no longer know the names of the birds here,
how to speak to them by their personal names.
Once we knew everything in this lush promise.
What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map.
Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us,
leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.
An imperfect map will have to do little one.
The place of entry is the sea of your mother
your father
There is no exit.
The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine --
a spiral on the road of knowledge.
You will travel through the membrane of death,
smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast
of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.
They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.
And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X,
no guide book with words you can carry.
You will have to navigate by your mother
Fresh courage glimmers from planets.
And lights the map printed with the blood of history,
a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.
When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers
where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.
You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.
A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.
Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth
who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map.
~ Joy Harjo ~
q
You don't get to choose how you are going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
Joan Baez
p
The Hungry Ghost
The president is on TV just now waving the flag,
explaining how we must be brave and send our young boys
to die
in order to protect this flag, and he
points to it, there on the wall
a big red white and blue flag.
He’s got a tiny one pinned to his lapel
and in the audience hundreds of people cheer
and wave little cloth flags back at him.
Oh my, after 10,000 years of this, after
generation upon generation upon generation
of young boys marching to their deaths, how
can we not know that the flags are always changing
with the arbitrary lines they draw on a map?
After 10,000 years of bloody death,
after 100 million dead in the twentieth century,
the bloodiest century in the history of mankind,
how can we not yet see that standing behind every flag
is the Hungry Ghost
starving for our juicy emotions, our fear and hatred,
mouth watering for the next course of young boys and
we wave the flag, we
cheer and scream and weep and pull our hair and
we send them rank and file by the millions
marching straight into the oven to be roasted
while the Hungry Ghost stands by exhorting us,
in one hand a sharpened boning knife,
in the other
a flag.
redhawk
Stephen Wilder
Mary McDowell Center for Learning
20 Bergen St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
718 625-3939
q
He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)
p
Satchel Paige
A good argument can be made that
he was the greatest pitcher who ever lived and
one of the cornerstones of that argument
would be what happened in 1942
when the greatest hitter in Negro League history,
Josh Gibson, faced the greatest pitcher, Satch.
Paige was skinny with legs as long as Pine trees
and Gibson had a barrel chest and shoulders
2 yards wide, thickly muscled hams for biceps
and his menacing crouch at the plate was feared
by every pitcher in the game save one: Satchel;
he wanted Josh
and in that historic game he
wanted him bad enough that he
walked 2 men to fill the bases so he
could pitch to Josh and then
he called out to the greatest hitter in baseball
exactly what he was going to throw and
struck Gibson out
on 3 straight
pitches;
a good argument
can be made and
that was Satchel’s argument.
redhawk
q
Only by living completely in the world can on learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself - even to make of oneself a righteous person.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
p
Remembrance of Karen
She dances to music
whether or not we can hear it.
Her smile proclaims the joy within;
it wells up and overflows into movement ~
DANCING!
Joy that will not be diminished;
like the sun
it warms the weary hearts around her.
Bright eyes match the bright colors she loves.
Her soul feasts on simple pleasures:
colorful magazines
a baby to cuddle
special friends
paper in her shoe.
Her heart will not contain her love—
it spills over onto anyone in her path
with hugs and smiles.
(the body, bent and bald, matters not)
Her beauty comes from within.
Ruth Hansen ~ March 2, 2007
p
The Dream of the Marsh Wren:
Reciprocal Creation
The marsh wren, furtive and tail-tipped,
by the rapid brown blurs of his movements
makes sense of the complexities of sticks
and rushes. He makes slashes and complicated
lines of his own in mid-air above the marsh
by his flight and the rattles of his incessant
calling. He exists exactly as if he were a product
of the pond and the sky and the blades of light
among the reeds and grasses, as if he were
deliberately willed into being by the empty
spaces he eventually inhabits.
And at night, inside each three-second
shudder of his sporadic sleep, understand
how he creates the vision of the sun
blanched and barred by the diagonal juttings
of the weeds, and then the sun as heavy
cattail crossed and tangled and rooted
deep in the rocking of its own gold water,
and then the sun as suns in flat explosions
at the bases of the tule. Inside the blink
of his eyelids, understand how he composes
the tule dripping sun slowly in gold rain
off its black edges, and how he composes
gold circles widening on the blue surface
of the sun's pond, and the sharp black
slicing of his wing rising against the sun,
and that same black edge skimming the thin
corridor of gold between sky and pond.
Imagine the marsh wren making himself
inside his own dream. Imagine the wren,
created by the marsh, inside the marsh
of his own creation, unaware of his being
inside this dream of mine where I imagine
he dreams within the boundaries of his own
fixed black eye around which this particular
network of glistening weeds and knotted
grasses and slow-dripping gold mist
and seeded winds shifting in waves of sun
turns and tangles and turns itself completely
inside out again here composing me
in the stationary silence of its only existence.
Pattiann Rogers
q
There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham.
-Anna Sewell, writer (1820-1878)
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