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The only way you can endure your pain is to let it be painful.

        Shunryu Suzuki  (1904-1971)  Soto Zen priest

 

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Sabbaths 1998, VI

 

By expenditure of hope,

Intelligence, and work,

You think you have it fixed.

It is unfixed by rule.

Within the darkness, all

Is being changed, and you

Also will be changed.

 

Now I recall to mind

A costly year: Jane Kenyon,

Bill Lippert, Philip Sherrard,

All in the same spring dead,

So much companionship

Gone as the river goes.

 

And my good workhorse Nick

Dead, who called out to me

In his conclusive pain

To ask my help. I had

No help to give. And flood

Covered the cropland twice.

By summer's end there are

No more perfect leaves.

 

But won't you be ashamed

To count the passing year

At its mere cost, your debt

Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

 

The gift is balanced by

Its total loss, and yet,

And yet the light breaks in,

Heaven seizing its moments

That are at once its own

And yours. The day ends

And is unending where

The summer tanager,

Warbler, and vireo

Sing as they move among

Illuminated leaves.

 

~ Wendell Berry ~

 

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...We can see from one perspective that human life is suffering, with its inevitable string of losses culminating in sickness, aging and death.  Yet from another perspective it is also grace -- filled with gifts and blessings, expressing a divine beauty.  Our very suffering can be seen as the grace that brings us to compassion, surrender and humility.

        Jack Kornfield

 

Stephen Wilder

sotan@optonline.net

516 747-5393

171 Pine St.

Garden City, NY 11530

 

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Praise Them

       Li-Young Lee

 

 

The birds don't alter space.

They reveal it. The sky

never fills with any

leftover flying. They leave

nothing to trace. It is our own

astonishment collects

in chill air. Be glad.

They equal their due

moment never begging,

and enter ours

without parting day. See

how three birds in a winter tree

make the tree barer.

Two fly away, and new rooms

open in December.

Give up what you guessed

about a whirring heart, the little

beaks and claws, their constant hunger.

We're the nervous ones.

If even one of our violent number

could be gentle

long enough that one of them

found it safe inside

our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,

who wouldn't hear

what singing completes us?

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A bird does not sing because he has an answer.  He sings because he has a song.

        Joan Walsh Anglund, author and illustrator of children's books

 

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Snowflakes

Snowflakes are fools God sweeps out of his kitchen.
Last night he emptied his dustbin all over western Montana
and we sure got a load of them
on top of everything else.
No wonder snow falls in such a light-headed mizzy,
makes us all silly,
immune, we believe, to all life's unreasonable demands—
our own children
when they become strange to us,
parents when they are frighteningly familiar because we've become
them, lovers
who want us to be their parents and children.

I spent this morning watching the border collie on Highway 200
chasing magpies from a road-killed deer. Entitled,
so spit-snapping-angry
that by noon when a golden eagle blew down
(that pitbull of raptors, known to airlift live lambs)
the dog hadn't yet had her first mouthful.

Had it been me I would have run home hurting for sympathy
and bit off my good husband's right ear,
kicked my own scat at my frightened children,
sung the family dirge: Injustice!
Then spent days as a field post, alone,
arm-wrestling with the winterly west wind.

At dusk the dog came home with one anvil-shaped hoof in her mouth,
seemed glad to have it.

Deborah Slicer

 

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The last of human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one's own way.

        Victor Frankel, holocaust survivor

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Ten Degrees

How beautiful the sun as it skims
across the air in the hush of ten degrees,
disc of palest yellow hope along a sky

of circumstance; how beautifully we watch it fall,
the random tern, forgotten mole,
the infant tree inside rough winter bark.

How beautiful this frost, female fingers
tracing down the glass, how beautiful
this world too cold to criticize itself;

how beautiful Earth's creatures are, happy
and forever safe from the only perfect tragedy,
which is of course to never have been born.

 

            Tom Chandler

 

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Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.It turns what we have into enough and more.

        Melody Beattie, author