Category: Main blog

I find it is so crucial in these challenging times as we witness the degradation of our leadership and our planet and the suffering of our siblings – to remember joy and wonder and beauty and compassion. It is there if we choose to recognize it, and it has the capacity to hold us up and create resilience as we continue our work for justice and peace. Mr. Zinn is, as always, a font of wisdom:

An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time.  To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.  It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.  What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.  If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. 

~ Howard Zinn ~

On this day of gratitude for our mother earth and our earthly mothers I found this practice from Richard Rohr’s blog simply exquisite. Please follow the link to listen the the absolutely beautiful rendition of this choral piece while reading and meditating on the words of e.e. cummings.

Practice: Alive Again

This Easter week we’ve explored Jesus’ resurrection as an archetype of the universal pattern all life follows. In the midst of suffering, grief, or depression, it can be hard to remember that this, too, shall pass. While we can’t skip over or rush through pain to get to a happy ending, sometimes it helps to focus on resurrection. Can you recall a time when you came out the other side of a hard experience, a day when you suddenly felt free? Can you imagine joy and healing and actually feel it in your body?

From this space of hope and possibility, read aloud and listen to a choir sing this poem by e. e. cummings. Try whispering and shouting the words. Listen in stillness or while dancing. What is it like to be “alive again today”?

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes 

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened) 

Listen to the audio recording here. 

The Book of Endings

Some time while you read this page 
or the next one, a species — 
a species as vast as your life 
and the lives of all your ancestors 
chasing bison across Old Europe 
or huddled around a fire — will disappear. 
A species that has found its own 
ways of eating, of moving, of hiding 
from predators; a species 
that meets itself and makes love 
in the bark of a tree or on the leaves 
of the canopy or in the humid dirt. 
And it has come with us for millions 
of years, for millions of years, 
it has watched the night 
and day follow each other, it has breathed 
with the frogs, it has wrapped 
the stars around it like a blanket, 
a patterned music, a map. 
At the beginning of this page 
there may have been three or four left, 
but now there is only one. 
And if you read this page again, 
it will be another one, another species, 
another story of four billion years 
telling itself for the last time. 
Wherever life began — a word, a wish 
breathed into water, a seed falling 
through space — it was all of us 
there — as it is now 
in this unknown last one. 
It has bored into wood, it has carried 
water on its back, it has drunk 
the dew from its back in the desert, 
it has fed its young with strips of 
leaves, it has built homes out of bark, 
it has caged the sky into a song, 
it has spoken in ways no man has heard. 
it has emerald wings 
it has sapphire wings 
it has wings of night 
you will never see it 
it is already gone.

— Sam Taylor

in Song of the Universe

Please enjoy this wonderful tribute to our dear friends the trees:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” 

― Hermann Hesse

This is from my friend and spiritual companion Rabbi Ted Falcon’s blog.

It is so important to hold to unconditional love in these challenging times.

Follow this link to his blog for today

I was blessed this last week to spend time with my lovely friends and cohort for my Spiritual Direction certificate program and the Interfaith Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley. At the beginning of one of our sessions, our instructor Scott read this compelling and beautiful poem that I wanted to share with all of you.

May you know these miraculous things: That you are YOU!

That your soul is a deep, dark, quiet forest.
That your known
self will never be more than a little clearing in that forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest
into the clearing of your known self, and then go back.

That you must have the courage to let them come and go.

May you never let those who strive for too much order
have the power to stifle the life deep inside your forest,

and may you continue to try always to recognize and submit
to the goodness, the gods, in yourself and in other men and women. 

(Adapted from D.H. Lawrence “Studies in Classic American Literature”)

As I’ve been walking the streets of Berkeley this week I’ve opened my heart to what might be possible. What might it look like if I recognized the divinity in each flower, in each stone, in each human whose eyes met mine? Holding that, this happened.

My brother lay in a doorway, 
Barefoot, curled against
the cold concrete.

In wonder, recognizing God 
I couldn’t
not see.

The Divine guided me:
Target store with a comforter for sale
Comforter that belonged
to my brother

And when I laid it gently over
his prone divinity
My other brother
looked at me
in wonder

And shook my hand
and blessed me.
I am truly blessed.

 No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away. 

~ Wendell Berry ~  

(Collected Poems)

May this day bring you light and guidance on your path. Enjoy this from David Whyte:

EASTER BLESSING

The blessing of the morning light to you,
may it find you even in your invisible
appearances, may you be seen to have risen
from some other place you know and have known
in the darkness and that that carries all you need.

May you see what is hidden in you
as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,
may that hidden darkness be your gift to give,
may you hold that shadow to the light
and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light,
may you join all of your previous disappearances
with this new appearance, this new morning,
this being seen again, new and newly alive.

…

© David Whyte
From EASTER BLESSING
In Memoriam John O’Donohue
In
THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD
Poetry by David Whyte
APRIL 2018 © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Waking here in the Yorkshire Dales in a quiet village, on a warm spring morning, amongst the birdsong and the cockerels crowing, the rooks beginning to wake and call to one another and build their nests, I am having my own private Easter Service just by listening through the open window. Easter morning to me, has always seemed to gather every other morning of the year in its arms, to sacralize that everyday but crucial threshold we cross in waking into the world again. If we are not caught in our own bubble of enforced ordinariness, abstract insulation and closed protection, this is an astonishing world always waiting for us to join our own voice in the taken for granted, but extraordinary privilege of speaking, living and breathing. DW

Innocence is not a fixed commodity to be replaced by experience, innocence is our ability to allow ourselves to be seen and heard anew by a continually reawakened world, by birdsong, by a familiar loved one’s face, even by our own searching eyes looking back at us from the mirror, again and again, in new ways. To be surprised, transfigured, and astonished. Innocence is our ability to be found by the world. DW
…

Awake in Grenada
Photo © David Whyte
Carrera Del Darro
Grenada, Spain April 2nd 2019

In our Sufi practice, we often use the Arabic mantra estoferallah, as a way to forgive ourselves when we forget we are divine and connected to all.

This poetry reminds us again how important it is to forgive unceasingly.

The Hard Truth

The hard truth is that we all love poorly . . .
We need to forgive and be forgiven
every day, every hour – unceasingly.
That is the great work of love
among the fellowship of the weak
that is the human family.
The voice that calls us the Beloved
is the voice of freedom
because it sets us free to love without wanting
anything in return.
This has nothing to do with self-sacrifice,
self-denial or self-depreciation.
But has everything to do with the abundance of love
that has been freely given to me and from which 
I freely want to give.
— Henri Nouwen, “Forgiveness: The Name of Love in a Wounded World,” excerpt from Weavings, March/April 1992