opening to all this

At hospice three patients died during the night and morning. A short time later a few of us with a spare moment–two nurses, a volunteer, and our new music therapist–gathered to bless the rooms in remembrance of those gone from us and those about to arrive into our care. Families have left, carrying with them white plastic bags of personal belongings, assorted flowers and mementos, and our heartfelt wishes for their next steps. Now my heart yearns for one of John O’Donohue’s blessings:  

May the touch of your skin

Register the beauty

Of the otherness

That surrounds you.

 

May your listening be attuned

To the deeper silence

Where sound is honed

To bring distance home.

 

May the fragrance

Of the breathing meadow

Refresh your heart

And remind you you are

A child of the earth.

 

May your inner eye

See through surfaces

And glean the real presence

Of everything that meets you.

 

May your soul beautify

The desire of your eyes

That you might glimpse

The infinity that hides

In the simple sights

That seem worn

To your usual eyes.

source: O’Donohue, J. (2008). To bless the space between us. New York: Doubleday, pp.40-41.

your monday poem

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

 

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

 

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

 

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

 

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

source:  Barks, C. (1995). (trans). The essential Rumi. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, p.90. Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) was a Persian teacher, scholar, poet and mystic in the Sufi tradition.

sunday’s poem, a day late

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), born in Prague, lived in France, Italy, Denmark, travelled widely, served in the Austrian army, died in Switzerland, considered one of the German language’s most important 20th century poets. His work addresses the difficulty of communion with the ineffable.

 

 … You, Beloved, who are all

 the gardens I have ever gazed at,

longing. An open window

in a country house–, and you almost

stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,–

you had just walked down them and vanished.

 

And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors

were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back

my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same

bird echoed through both of us

yesterday, separate, in the evening . . . 

 

source:  Mitchell, S. (1982). (ed. & trans.). The selected poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. New York:  Vintage, p.131. image:  score to Beethoven’s song cycle ”To the distant beloved.”

 

frailty and longing

 

A tumultuous morning at hospice. A patient in her twenties died at 9:32, leaving behind a five-year old daughter, a husband-to-be, her parents. Word of her passing rippled through the floor. You could see people hugging, some with tears, others silently going about caring for the living.

 

We’d had eleven deaths last week and this one touched us especially. Why was that? Because she’d been so young, too young? Old people die, yes, but not someone at her age, with so much life still ahead. Did her death alert us to our own mortality, and that of people dear to us? “This sucks,” someone said, another that it was “all so wrong.” Then we heard that a fellow-worker was away, taking her twenty-year-old to the cancer clinic for a scan of a reoccurred tumour. A call went out for an impromptu healing circle.

 

We gathered in the meditation room, seated in a circle, nurses and volunteers. The bell rang three times, calling our attention inward, there to locate our breath. Each in-breath new life, each out-breath a dying … built-in reminders of the impermanence of everything. We practiced metta (see my post on May 20), expanding awareness from our own heart to others’ who might be hurting. May they be free from fear. May they be at ease. May they be happy. Our music therapist played ”Ashokan Farewell” on her flute and I read this poem: 

God of the Wind,

   Spirit God,

You, God, Larger than Life,

   Greater than the Day,

      Fuller than the Event,

I can be alone with You.

      Alone with the Alone.

 

I feel scattered.

   Yet centered, breathing,

      Allowing your spirit to be in my sensing.

   I dance and settle and move on. Slowly.

      Present to the Moment,

Full of human frailty and longing,

Enclosed in joy and wonder. 

poem source: “Enclosed in wonder” by Donna J. Maebore. Sacred Journey: the journal of fellowship in prayer. June/July 2008, p.25. www.sacredjourney.org; image: www.ssprj.org.

a crack in everything

 

   From Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:

 

The birds they sang

at the break of day

Start again

I heard them say,

Don’t dwell on what

has passed away

or what is yet to be.

 

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There’s a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

…

 

Leonard Cohen, Canadian poet, songwriter and novelist, spent five years at Mount Baldy Zen Center in California and now lives in Montreal.

ever present

From Burnt Norton (No. 1 of Four Quartets) by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born English playwright, poet, and critic. image: “Wanderer above the mist” by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), German Romantic landscape painter.  

 

… Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

 … 

tumbling

.

Several streams converged yesterday. First, the end of my second week working at the hospice: a steep learning curve, to bed by nine, nourished and exhausted. Second, after baking 40 loaves of sourdough bread, on the ferry by 7 am to get to the farmers market; sold out in 20 minutes, a line-up of disappointed customers: I so wanted to please/feed everyone. Third, amidst Morris Dancers, local Choral Society, across a sea of may-pole frolickers … I suddenly saw her: The One I Still Love. 

 

After 14 months. the ache was as real as ever. As soon as I could find my car, I fled to my friends’ farm, climbed in the hammock: tears at last, heart pounding, then sleep. All the while, a cat sat purring on my chest and a dog waited to fetch. Woke up calmer … noticed with amazement the depths of the heart’s currents.

 

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Robert Bly

 

Shake of this sadness, and recover your spirit;

sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate

that brushes your heel as it turns going by,

the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

 

Now you are only giving food to that final pain

which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,

but to live is to work, and the only things which lasts

is the work;  start then, turn to work.

 

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,

don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,

and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

 

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,

for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;

from your work you will be able on day to gather yourself.

 

source:  Bly, R., Hillman, J. & M. Meade. (Eds.) (1992). The rag and bone shop of the heart: poems for men. HarperCollins, p.234. image: Eros & Psyche www.danheller.com.

to love what we don’t have

.

When accepting the Nobel Prize, Pablo Naruda said that the poet must achieve a balance “between solitude and solidarity, between feeling and action, between intimacy of one’s self, the intimacy of mankind, and the revelation of nature.” You may want to read the following lines more than once, allowing them to pierce your carapace.

 

My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.

I love what I do not have. You are so far.

My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.

But night comes and starts to sing to me.

 

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.

And as I love you, the pines in the wind

want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

 

From “Here I Love You” by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Chilean poet, political activist, and Nobel Laureate for Literature (1971). source: Merwin, W.S. (Trans.) (1969) Twenty love poems and a song of desire. Penguin Classics, p.71. image by Pablo Picasso.

.

a heart’s desire

Make me sweet again,

fragrant and fresh and wild,

and thankful for any small event.

–Rumi

 

grace inside

My inside, listen to me, the great spirit,
the Teacher, is near,
wake up, wake up!

Run to his feet–
he is standing close to your head right now.

You have slept for millions and millions of years.
Why not wake up this morning?

Poem by Kabir, fifteenth-century, son of a Moslem weaver in Benares, influenced by Sufi poets and Hindu ideas. source: The Kabir book. Version by Robert Bly. (1971). Boston: Beacon Press, p.13.

sunday poem

Last night as I was sleeping,

I dreamt—marvellous error!—

that I had a beehive

here inside my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.

 

Dedicated to s.zee on your birthday.

“Last night as I was sleeping” by Antonio Machado (2nd of four stanzas); version by Robert Bly

 

daily wish

.

 

I would love to live

Like a river flows,

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

 

–John O’Dunohue (1956-2008), Irish poet and philosopher

.

ode to joy

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver published by Atlantic Monthly Press © Mary Oliver 

unspoken and half-glimpsed

For the anniversary of my death © W.S. Mervin 

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 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 an falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Roger Housden writes: “A second, a third reading, and I begin to glimpse the terrain more distinctly. It is my life he is summoning here, my life and yours; its underground streams; the inchoate feelings that, even unvoiced, lace their way through the events of an ordinary day. Mervin is bringing the unspoken, the half-glimpsed, the blurred shapes in the corner of the mind, into a sharper focus through the lens of his poem.”  Roger Housden. (2001). Ten poems to change your life. Harmony Books, p.86.

be patient, my friend

Rumi says:

“Don’t look at your form, however ugly or beautiful. Look at love and at the aim of your quest. … O you whose lips are parched, keep looking for water. Those parched lips are proof that eventually you will reach the source.”