finite

from my porch right now, life feels exquisite. the morning light, the breeze, the clarity of dry air, the promise of another day. another week.  the week of transition.  the end of the summer, the beginning of a new school year. another meeting about rose- zoe in a classroom.  a lot to could happen this week- or nothing- and things i have no idea about will unfold, or begin, or end.

yesterday bryn asked when God was born.  i had a moment.  one of the moments when you try to wrap your mind around something outside of your mind- when you try to imagine infinity- when you try to remove the bounds of time and step out of this dimension. 

'God wasn't born bryn, he just was, always.'

he looked appropriately puzzled, but it registered as very possible.  because when you are five- you can still engage in the mystery.

how can something not begin? and not end? starting and finishing is all we know.  time is. it moves. again i felt my smallness- that there is so much we don't know, or understand, or even have the capacity to grasp.  i guess that is why we so often choose not to believe. belief is risky. admitting we don't know is threatening. keeping our system closed - keeping things in this world- limiting them to our understanding- that maintains our sense of control, kind of.

but then we let go of the mystery. we lose embracing possibility and space and timelessness. so i choose to hold my smallness, to be okay with my limitedness, to trust that deep knowing that whispers inside: there is more. 

here we are.  today we live in this time, in these bodies, and we still must ask the question- what will we do with our one wild and precious life?  with this wild and precious day?


The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
- mary oliver

saturday morning with rose and a poem

BONE

 

1.

 

Understand, I am always trying to figure out

what the soul is,

and where hidden,

and what shape

and so, last week,

when I found on the beach

the ear bone

of a pilot whale that may have died

hundreds of years ago, I thought

maybe I was close

to discovering something

for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale; shaped

like a squat spoon

with a pink scoop where

once, in the lively swimmer's head,

it joined its two sisters

in the house of hearing,

it was only

two inches long

and thought: the soul

might be like this

so hard, so necessary

3.

yet almost nothing.

Beside me

the gray sea

was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

unfolding over and over

its time-ridiculing roar;

I looked but I couldn't see anything

through its dark-knit glare;

yet don't we all know, the golden sand

is there at the bottom,

though our eyes have never seen it,

nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down

into fractions, and facts

certainties

and what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,

truly I know

our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving,

which is the way I walked on,

softly,

through the pale-pink morning light.

from Why I Wake Early (2004)

mary oliver

tuesday evening poem

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit

  likes to dress up like this:

   ten fingers,

   ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest

  at night

   in the black branches,

     in the morning

in the blue branches

  of the world.

   It could float, of course,

     but would rather

plumb rough matter.

  Airy and shapeless thing,

   it needs

     the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,

  the oceanic fluids;

   it needs the body's world,

     instinct

and imagination

  and the dark hug of time,

   sweetness

     and tangibility,

to be understood,

  to be more than pure light

   that burns

     where no one is --

so it enters us --

  in the morning

   shines from brute comfort

     like a stitch of lightning;

and at night

  lights up the deep and wondrous

   drownings of the body

     like a star.

mary oliver

it's saturday- a little poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning

I sat down

on a hillside

to think about God -

a worthy pastime.

Near me, I saw

a single cricket;

it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.

How great was its energy,

how humble its effort.

Let us hope

it will always be like this,

each of us going on

in our inexplicable ways

building the universe.

Mary Oliver

from Why I Wake Early (2004)

a sunday poem

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -

An armful of white blossoms,

A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

Biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall

Knifing down the black ledges?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -

A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet

Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

mary oliver

just a poem...again

tonight the moon was that perfect sliver and beside her a star so bright it must be a planet and the rest of the night lay deeply dark, no clouds.  as the moon sunk the sky filled with so many lights. i wanted to bring out a mat, and fall asleep watching them, finding their patterns and stories.

 

 

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.   

- Mary Oliver