Every day

"Make of yourself a light,"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Mary Oliver

Our mortal heart

A lovely poem by Mary Oliver. She sees a dead tree and it remindes her of something or someone she has lost in her life. She talks of the tree which she loved. There are other trees. But this one she loved. It can be the same for all the losses in our lives, since everyday we lose something, as Stephen Levine reminds us.



Every day
on my way to the pond
I pass the lightning-felled,
chesty,
hundred-fingered, black oak
which, summers ago,
swam forward when the storm

laid one lean yellow wand against it, smoking it open
to its rosy heart.
It dropped down
in a veil of rain,
in a cloud of sap and fire,
and became what it has been ever since--
a black boat
floating
in the tossing leaves of summer,

like the coffin of Osiris
descending
upon the cloudy Nile.
But, listen, I'm tired of that brazen promise:
death and resurrection.
I'm tired of hearing how the nitrogens will return
to the earth again,
through the hinterland of patience--
how the mushrooms and the yeasts
will arrive in the wind--
how they'll anchor the pearls of their bodies and begin
to gnaw through the darkness,
like wolves at bones--

what I loved, I mean, what that tree--
tree of the moment--tree of my own sad, mortal heart--
and I don't want to sing anymore of the way

Osiris came home at last, on a clean
and powerful ship, over
the dangerous sea, as a tall
and beautiful stranger.

Mary Oliver, The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond

Practice

In your light I learn how to love
In your beauty, how to make poems

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art...


Rumi

The music in our heart

If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed
and thus the wilderness bloomed, with all its
followers; gardeners, lovers, people who weep for the death of rivers

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body.
Do you understand?
For truly the body needs
a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable
beauty of heaven
where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.

Mary Oliver, A Red Bird explains herself

Practice is patient work

God won't be in life like a bright morning.
We have to go down into the shaft
And through the hard work of mining
bring up the earth's abundance.
We have to stand hunched over
And in tunnels dig him out.


Rainer Maria Rilke

Connect

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me”
Of course, you do not do so out loud; otherwise
Someone would call the cops
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
In each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

Hafiz

Three things

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver.

Easter

In Ireland and elsewhere, the Lily is a symbol of Easter, being associated with new life and a pure offering to God.
In this simple poem, Mary Oliver sees the flower as silently following night and day, darkness and light, the up's and down's of life, trusting, knowing that the dawn will follow the night.
This trust is the perfect attitude, the perfect prayer, the attitude we try to cultivate in sitting.


Night after night
darkness enters the face
of the lily
which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content to stand there
in the garden, not quite sleeping,
and, maybe, saying in lily language
some small words we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,
its lips are so secret,
its tongue is so hidden –
or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun –
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?

Mary Oliver, The Lily

All this joy

Hopkins says it well. Spring fills us with joy and with the energy of life. He believes it is because we link back to the freshness of life in the Garden of Eden, when everything was optimistic and without deceit or disappointment. Maybe. It certainly gives one a new energy as all around we see nature reawakening. We know we have to leave the Garden. But moments there refresh us. We will not spoil it by thinking ahead.

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

A reflection on love

I visited Paris recently and while there spent time in the Orangerie, standing before Monet's beautiful series of Water Lily paintings. What struck me most is the different emotions contained in each painting, from tranquil to agitated, light to dark, as each canvas reflected a different period of the day or different season of the year. I looked on them as a reflection on light, on the passing of time.

However, since coming back I have read that Monet painted these works after the death of his beloved Alice, moving from the more realistic portrayal seen in his earlier style to the abstract swirls and splashes used here. So more than a reflection on light, they are a reflection on love. These huge circular canvases around the walls come to represent eternity, and the emotions within them the never-ending love which he found in that relationship. Not all light, but shadows and shades. But all within the beauty of a love remembered.

I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Robert Hayden, Monet's Waterlilies

My use of time

How do I kill time?
Let me count the ways.

By worrying about things
over which I have no control.
Like the past.
Like the future.

By harbouring resentment
and anger
over hurts
real or imagined.

By disdaining the ordinary
or rather, what I,
so mindlessly
call ordinary.

By concern over what's in it for me
rather than what's in me
for it.

By failing to appreciate what is
because of might-have-beens
should-have-beens
could-have-beens.

These are some of the ways
I kill time.

Leo Rock, s.j.

A new voice

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!" each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

Endings

For last year’s words
belong to last year’s language
and next year’s words
await another voice.



And to make an end
is to make a beginning.

T.S. Eliot

The Rose

How did the Rose
ever open its heart
and give the world
all of its beauty?
It felt the encouragement
of light against its being,
otherwise we all remain
too frightened.

Hafiz

Love

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.

Rumi

When its over

Saw the first snowdrops today. The wonder of nature, of Spring returning. Reminded me of words by Mary Oliver, similar to those yesterday by Stephen Levine. What is one waiting for to begin ones life? Some day in the future when such and such changes? What fears hold us back from fully embracing what is offered now? As the ancient Chinese said, we wish to reach the evening of our life without regret.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver, When Death Comes

A prayer

Remembering the mother of a friend

May there be some beautiful surprise
Waiting for you inside death
Something you never knew or felt,
Which with one simple touch
Absolves you of all loneliness and loss,
As you quicken within the embrace
For which your soul was eternally made.



May your heart be breathless
In the light and lightness
Where each and every thing
Is at last its true self
Within that serene belonging
That dwells beside us
On the other side
Of what we see.

John O'Donoghue, Benedictus

The imperfect is our paradise

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations.
The light In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Wallace Stevens

Teachings all around

Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me with delight,
that leaves me like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for--
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world--
to instruct myself over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant--
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself, how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings as these--
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made out of grass?

Mary Oliver Mindful

Experience everything

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet