p

Earth Dweller

It was all the clods at once become

precious; it was the barn, and the shed,

and the windmill, my hands, the crack

Arlie made in the axe handle: oh, let me stay

here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;

let the sun casually rise and set.

If I have not found the right place,

teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are

vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing

for the saints forever, the shed and the windmill

rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

Now, I know why people worship, carry around

magic emblems, wake up talking dreams

they teach to their children: the world speaks.

The world speaks everything to us.

It is our only friend.

William Stafford

q

Things are not what they seem to be; nor are they otherwise.

            Lankavatara Sutra

 

Dishwater

Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.

 

            Ted Kooser

 

q

Everything you've learned in school as `obvious' becomes less and less

obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no

solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are

no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

-R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)

p

A Ballad of Going Down to the Store

 

First I went down to the street

by means of the stairs,

just imagine it,

by means of the stairs.

 

Then people know to people unknown

passed me by and I passed them by.

Regret

that you did not see

how people walk,

regret!

 

I entered a complete store;

lamps of glass were glowing,

I saw somebody – he sat down –

and what did I hear?  what did I hear?

rustling of bags and human talk.

 

And indeed,

indeed,

I returned.

 

Miron Bialoszewski (trans. By Czeslaw Milosz)

 

q

There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

p

Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

~ Richard Wilbur ~

 

q

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation.  The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

            James Baldwin

 

p

For the Anniversary of My Death

 

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When  the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

 

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

 

                        W. S. Merwin

 

The trouble is that you think you have time.

                        Jack Kornfield

 

After Years

 

Today, from a distance, I saw you

walking away, and without a sound

the glittering face of a glacier

slid into the sea.  An ancient oak

fell in the Cumberlands, holding only

a handful of leaves, and an old woman

scattering corn to her chickens looked up

for an instant.  At the other side

of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times

the size of our own sun exploded

and vanished, leaving a small green spot

on the astronomer’s retina

as he stood in the great open dome

of my heart with no one to tell.

 

                        Ted Kooser

 

q

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness, but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

 

                        ~ Aleksander Solzhenitsyn ~

Twilight: After Haying

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed—
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
—sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen ... the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses ...

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

 

Jane Kenyon

Letting Go in the Dawnlight

 

Let go, Tom, let your saddle and bridle go.

Let go, Tom, of all the men and women you were.

Let go, Tom, of who we all were together,

Carousing, drinking, telling lies, and funny stories,

Turn your best horses out to pasture, Tom.

See those blue mountain ranges lying in the dawnlight.

They’re where we all began and where we all will go.

Let go of the Animas Mountains, Tom.

Let go of Indian Canyon, let go of the old Adobe Camp.

Let go of the Godfrey, let go of the Lynch.

All of your friends are waiting there,

By those blue mountain ranges, lying in the dawnlight.

They’re waiting to take you in.

Let go, Tom, let go, Tom, let go, Tom

Let go.

 

(Tom was a Grey Ranch cowboy from 1960 to 2002)

 

                        Drum Hadley

 

q

Don't be afraid that your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.

        Grace Hansen