Announcing your place in the family of things

The other day I was looking through poems by Mary Oliver and ran across this one. Seems like a good day for a poem. I've probably run this before, but here it is again:

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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,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Art: Hiroshige (1797 - 1858) Japanese Woodblock print "Wild Geese against the Full Moon"

Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About It.

The Rev. Dr. Ann Willms
Celebrant at our Centennial Service 2010
Photo by Bonny Bronson

Today is last Sunday that The Rev. Dr. Ann Willms will be with us at St. Paul's. I hope you will join us for worship and to hear her final sermon with us.

I must again express my sadness at her departure, but also my gratitude for the tremendous ministry she has done among us. Please join me in wishing her many blessings as she explores new ways to live into her baptism and ordination vows.

Thanks Ann!

On Friday, at our Lenten Luncheon, Professor Margaret Mohrmann quoted from poet Mary Oliver with a stanza from her poem Sometimes: “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

I thought you might enjoy reading the full poem:

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Sometimes
By Mary Oliver

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn't an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don't know what God is.
I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime
melancholy leaves me breathless...

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Photo by Lori Korleski Richardson

Art above by Chiura Obata, Untitled, 1927

One day you finally knew what you had to do

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany when we mark the journey of the wise men -- the Magi -- who come from the East, and follow a star to Bethlehem to find the Christ child and his family. The story of the Magi appears only in Matthew 2:1-12, and nowhere else.

The story leaves more questions than answers. We know almost nothing about these wise men. The gospel does not tell us how many wise men there were, though legend puts it at three. Were they the only ones who saw the star? No one else seems to see it. What did they see that no one else saw? And did they get home again?

The Magi innocently tip off King Herod, who proceeds to murder all the boy infants of Bethlehem to get at Jesus. The Magi leave by another route, warned of what was to happen. Were they chastened by what they had unwittingly unleashed? Were they truly wise in following the star? We get precious few answers from this story.

What are we left with then? It may be some comfort that this legend is probably only that -- a legend that made its way into the Bible to make a larger point. Herod did not massacre the children of Bethlehem, though he certainly killed many innocents. Matthew uses the story to propel Jesus into Egypt so that he can emerge as the "new Moses," and that is the greater message that the gospel writer wants us to hear.

Yet the story is entrancing. The Magi just had to follow that star. The wise thing for the wise men to do would have been to stay home. But they set aside that "wisdom" and followed the star across the continent to a foreign land. The lives they saved were there own, and indirectly ours, too, because of their example. There are times we need take a risk, follow the star, put aside everyone else's wisdom, and go where the star might lead. Poet Mary Oliver captures the idea as only a poet can:

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The Journey
By Mary Oliver

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.

The farthest star and the mud at our feet are family

I am a bit under the weather, home with a chest cold. Although I intended to write a reflection for today  (on what I am not sure), instead I am reading and gazing out the window at the unremittingly gray sky. Autumn is nearly gone, the trees are now almost barren on our mountainside. The world is feeling a little smaller, a little more closed in on itself. Winter is not yet here, but almost.

Our friend Karen in Tennessee sent this other day, from a book by Mary Oliver, Winter Hours:

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"I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves- we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny."

Dancing with the stars

Today's sermon is based on the readings for today: Acts 1:6-14, Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36, 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11, and John 17:1-11. To listen to the audio of this sermon click HERE.

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What makes your soul dance? 

Does your soul dance when you listen to music, or the birds singing on an early morning walk? Does your soul dance when you gaze up at the sweep of the sky on a clear summer night, or feel the sand between your toes on a walk on a beach? 

Does your soul dance when you read the words on the page of a great novel or a poem, or when you enjoy a great meal with people you love? 

Human beings are created to dance. 

All of us can dance even when our feet never move, if only we let ourselves dance.
When you dance, what do you see? Which way do you face when you dance? 

There is a poem by Mary Oliver entitled “Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?” 

She writes about a Sufi poet who is whirling – dancing – and she wonders which way he faces when he is dancing. 

Let me share with you a few lines:

“When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring,
or was he looking
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there…”

Which way do you face when you dance? Inward or outward? Or both? What do you see when you dance? Who do you see? 

Does your soul dance at the touch of someone you love who is near? Does your soul dance at the memory of someone gone? 

Those we love dance with us even when they are gone. Maybe that is why it is so hard when someone we love departs from us and one dance ends before another begins. 

The lessons today are about the pain of the dance ending. Jesus has died on a cross, and his tomb is empty and, yet, somehow he has come back to his followers for a time and danced with them. 

He has come to them in dreams and visions, at meals and on a beach; on a walk on a road and in a closed room, and the disciples learn to dance with him once more. 

Then this dance ends. Jesus is carried into the clouds and disappears from their sight. The Church calls this event the Ascension, and it sounds so weighty and grand and glorious. 

But I would imagine that for the first followers of Jesus, this was not so grand and glorious. As their dreams and visions ended – as the dance ended – they must have felt a terrible silence, and a void in their hearts. 

They must have searched deep within souls for a thread of faith that there would be new steps to the dance. They must have felt very alone, very disoriented. 

Life and faith can be like that for us. There are moments of silence and loneliness, and that kind of silence is not comforting. Sometimes silence is only silence – and our soul craves to dance.

The first disciples went back in their aloneness to their upper room – their hiding place – to wait what for was next. 

They would learn new dance steps. But learning the new steps is not so easy. Feet get knotted up, and they stumbled and fell. The new dance was as disorienting as the deadening silence that came before it. 

Maybe at first those first disciples began to sing. Maybe they sang the words of the psalm: “Lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds…God gives the desolate a home to live in.” 

And then maybe they remembered a few words by Jesus that lingered in the air, perhaps the words we hear in John’s Gospel today. 

In the gospel, Jesus tells his disciples about the next dance. The passage is sometimes called “Jesus’ Farewell Discourse” – his last teaching – and his words are presented as a prayer. 

Truthfully, the Early Church added dense layers of language onto his “discourse,” and to me, much of this gospel lesson today sounds stilted and churchy with its declarations of “authority over all people.” That is the unmistakable sound of the Church speaking. 

But listen beneath those layers for the words that dance. Listen for the real Jesus facing both outward and inward at the same time as he dances with his disciples: 

“And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” 

Can we dance with this? How can he say we are “one”? We know the world looks than that: Warfare, religious strife, poverty, partisan politics and petty church politics – none of that looks like we are one. 

Or maybe there is another way of seeing us as one. Maybe we are one in the dance precisely because we are different from each other. 

It is because of our differences that we can dance together. We are one in the dance. 

Like the Sufi poet, we need look inside ourselves for the Spirit within us that brings us joy, and we need to look outside ourselves to see who is there with us. We need to learn to dance in this world with people who are different than us. 

We need to learn the steps over and over. We need to learn to dance with the Risen Christ who is in us and among us and in front of us. We need to learn the steps every day of our lives, and take help from others when we stumble and falter in the dance. 

And when we dance, we need whirl once in awhile and see who, and what, is around us. We need to dance with all that life brings us. 

It is in learning the dance that we truly will be one, and truly blessed, and may our dance bring all of us joy. Amen.

I am much in debt to my friend Linda Lee Clader once again for her inspiration. Her commentary in Feasting on the Word (Year A, Volume 2, page 539) highlighted for me the idea of how we are one in our dance together.

Mary Oliver's poem, “Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?” brought me still closer to seeing the dance in the lessons for today. Here is Mary's poem in full:

Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?
By Mary Oliver


Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.
It's frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold. 

But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn't the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven't the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard? 

Don't call this world an explanation, or even an education. 

When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring, 

as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?


(Why I Wake Early, 2004)

The cusp between seasons, sitting on a hillside to think about God

We are on the cusp between seasons. The air is warm, but not as moist as a week ago. The trees are starting to twinkle golden on the edges, but are still lush.

Summer is finishing, but not yet done, and autumn is in the air, but not quite here.

Here is a poem sent by Karen from Tennessee to mark the season that is still with us. Enjoy your day.

Song of the Builders
By Mary Oliver

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.

Art: Tenaya Peak, by Chiura Obata, 1930

A needle in the haystack of delight

Today I am taking a break from the pulpit. Ann Willms is back from her vacation and is preaching. For those interested in the lessons she is using today: Jeremiah 23:23-29, Psalm 82, Luke 12:49-56

Here is a poem by Mary Oliver, a gift from our friend Karen in Tennessee. Enjoy your Sunday, the day the Lord has made!

Mindful

by Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was 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?

Clouds, air, summer poems and paintings

Summer is now officially here, the season of outdoor cooking, rose´ wine, sparkling sunsets, and slowing down. The other evening, Lori and enjoyed dinner with old friends at their Craftsman-era home. And we got an additional treat: they showed us five original paintings by Chiura Obata that have never been in a museum or a catalog.

The paintings were inherited from our friend's mother, who studied under Obata at the University of California, Berkeley. Each of these wonderful paintings had lightness and a feeling of motion.

Two were traditional Japanese brush paintings, and three had the more familiar Obata style that makes me feel like I am floating on a cloud. Obata (1885-1975) you may recall is famous for his airy renderings of Yosemite.

The painting at right is of El Capitan at Yosemite; the painting below is of the Topaz Mountains (and not one of our friend's paintings -- we will leave reproduction of their paintings to them).

Here is a poem for summer by Mary Oliver:

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

By Mary Oliver

Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun's brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can't hear

anything, I can't see anything -
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker -
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing -
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet -
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body
is sure to be there.

The Summer Day and time for a break

My friends, the time has come for Lori and I to take a break. We've been going flat out since General Convention last July, with fall classes, two EfM groups, Thanksgiving and Christmas, Yule Log hunt, confirmation class, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter.

We've been visited by the Presiding Bishop and the Diocesan Bishop. We've had four blizzards since the Fourth Sunday of Advent, and we've hosted the Parish Tea and the Pentecost Picnic. We've had more special Sundays than I can count. We've also had 10 funerals at St. Paul's since the beginning of the year.

It is definitely time for a break. Time to reconnect with family and friends far away.

That also means I will step back a bit from this blog. Not completely, but this blog can use a rest, too. I will post from time-to-time as events and the Spirit move, but not every day. So please check back, and we will pick up the pace again in July.

For now, let me leave you with a favorite poem by -- who else? -- Mary Oliver. I've used it before but it is well worth repeating. Enjoy your summer...

The Summer Day

By Mary Oliver

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?

Painting of Evening Glow at Mono Lake, Calif., by Chiuri Obata (1885-1975)

Acorns and oaks

It's been awhile since I've posted something from Mary Oliver. With all that is going on around us -- so many changes, so many ups and downs -- today let's take the long view, through the eyes of a great poet. This is a gift from our friend Karen in Tennessee:

Fletcher Oak

By Mary Oliver

There is a tree here so beautiful it even has a name. Every morning, when it is still dark, I stand under its branches. They flow from the thick and silent trunk. One can’t begin to imagine their weight. Year after year they reach, they send out smaller and smaller branches, and bunches of flat green leaves, to touch the light.

Of course this has consequences. Every year the oak tree fills with fruit. Just now, since it is September, the acorns are starting to fall.

I don’t know if I will ever write another poem. I don’t know if I am going to live for a long time yet, or even for a while.

But I am going to spend my life wisely. I’m going to be happy, and frivolous, and useful. Every morning, in the dark, I gather a few acorns and imagine, inside of them, the pale oak trees. In the spring, when I go away, I’ll take them with me, to my own country, which is a land of sun and restless ocean and moist woods. And I’ll dig down, I’ll hide each acorn in a cool place in the black earth.

To rise like a slow and beautiful poem. To live a long time.

Photo by Gordon Osmundson, 1999.

Seeing in three dimensions

This time of year, our front porch in Charlottesville is perfect for giving us a never-ending spectacle of birds. Lori put three bird feeders on the porch, including one for humming birds. Another feeder seems to attract cardinals, while another gets the gold finches.

I am sitting in my rocking chair writing this, and the birds are fluttering back and forth to the feeders. The humming birds haven't shown up yet, but they will soon, I hope.

When I look to the trees beyond, I can see many small birds flying from branch to branch. If you take them in all at once, you can see them as a web of birds constantly in motion.

Our house is at the top of a hill, and in the waning hours of the day, we can gaze across at the tree tops and see all manner of larger birds including hawks and an eagle of two. And at dusk, a few bats swoop around gobbling up flying insects.

There is one bird I am hoping to see but haven't yet -- an owl.

In Sacramento, our house was in an urban forest, and we built a second-story deck in the backyard just so we could see what was up in the trees. In the summer, we'd sit on the deck with a glass of wine and wait for our favorite dusk visitor: the neighborhood's white owl. The owl would cruise along just above the trees, huge gray wings looking almost like a ghost. We are fairly sure the owl made its nest in the big trees of a nearby cemetery.

God's creation truly dwells in three dimensions. We who live on the ground sometimes see it only in two. We are blessed that the birds remind us to look up.

Here is a poem sent the other day by our friend Karen from Tennessee:

Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard

by Mary Oliver

His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes - when he lifts their soft lids -
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder -
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.

Never mind that he eats only
the black-smocked crickets,
and the dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear -

it’s not size but surge that tells us
when we’re in touch with something real,
and when I hear him in the orchard
fluttering
down the little aliminum
ladder of his scream -
when I see his wings open, like two black ferns,

a flurry of palpitations
as cold as sleet
rackets across the marshlands
of my heart
like a wild spring day.

Somewhere in the universe,
in the gallery of important things,
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish,
sits on its pedestal.
Dear, dark dapple of plush!
A message, reads the label,
from that mysterious conglomerate:
Oblivion and Co.
The hooked head stares
from its house of dark, feathery lace.
It could be a valentine.

The sun blazes for everyone

I much feel the need for a poem today: a few words of respite amidst what has been a very heavy ten days or so. Karen from Tennessee sent this across awhile back (and I have run it before), and it fills me with a touch of hope for humanity and our planet. The sunrise photo is from Egypt at the Red Sea.

Tonight at 7 pm we will hold a special service of prayers and remembrance for the people of Haiti. Please join us if you can.

Here's the poem:

Sunrise
by Mary Oliver

You can
die for it --
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of China ,
and India
and Europe , and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

A poem and a photo for your day

Alas, friends, I have not had the time I'd like this week to devote to this blog. I have not tackled any of those big-hard-questions I spoke of last week. A few are turning over in my mind, but none have surfaced in the fullness of the limited time of the season. Perhaps next week.

So how about a poem today? Here is a wonderful gift sent to me by our friend Leslie Middleton, and fitting for the brisk days we are now getting.

The photo is another gift. I mentioned last week that in my prayer life I sometimes return in my imagination to particular ridge in the High Sierra. My friend David Link sent this photo of me on that ridge line, at dusk a couple of years back near May Lake in Yosemite.

Enjoy your Friday. Here's the poem...

Starlings in Winter
by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Travels on my front porch: Have a blessed Sunday

It rained off and on Saturday, so we enjoyed the woods from our front porch. Sometimes a great adventure can be had without going too far.

The trees are ablaze in yellows, reds and orange; the openings in the clouds between rain squalls bring flashes of sunlight that make the trees seem on fire.

I am not preaching today, so no sermon from me here (The Rev. Dr. Ann Willms is preaching; her sermon will be on-line later in the day on our main website).

Rather than more sermonizing from me, I thought I'd pass along a poem by Mary Oliver, courtesy of our friend Karen in Tennessee, and a few photos taken from our front porch. Have a blessed Sunday...

Sunrise
by Mary Oliver

You can
die for it --
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of China ,
and India
and Europe , and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

Summer on our front porch: Rockers and red birds

When I got home late Tuesday, a birthday present from Lori was waiting for me on the front porch: A wooden rocker -- an old Southern wooden rocker with worn varnish and green leaves painted on the arm rests and head board. Lori found it in a second-hand store. This rocker is perfect. I perched in it late into the evening, listening to the roar of insects and the rumble of trains in the distance, and watching the moon light dance across the tree tops. Fire flies burst from the grass in front. The night settled into its own rhythm, and I with it. 

Our front porch in the daytime is alive in a different way. In the daytime, the birds are thick waiting their turn for a meal. Humming birds flutter at a feeder near the front steps. Bigger birds come and go at another feeder on the south side of the porch. I am reminded of a poem by Mary Oliver, a summer offering from our friend Karen in Tennessee.

Red Bird Explains Himself

by Mary Oliver

“Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow
and I was the song in the summer leaves, but this was
only the first trick
I had hold of among my other mythologies,
for I also knew obedience: bring sticks to the nest,
food to the young, kisses to my bride.

But don’t stop there, stay with me: listen.

If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed,
and thus wilderness bloomed that, 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.”

Mysteries

I'm not sure if I have run this before, but I rather like it. The week can use a little astonishment, so here is a lovely poem from Mary Oliver. Enjoy...

Mysteries, Yes
By Mary Oliver

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Spring and the cycle of life

Spring is in full blush in Virginia. We took a trip up to Northern Virginia yesterday afternoon to pick up my cousin Cait, who is here for a few days from Ireland. The trees along the route are gushing with new green. The colors in Virginia change daily: red or pink on the redbud trees one day, then the dogwoods burst into white the next day. Meanwhile, the green canopy on the big trees is bursting forth.

Yet with all of this new life of Spring, there is a sharp contrast with the farewells we are enduring at St. Paul's in recent days. We've had three funerals in a week, and there are two more coming in the next week. These always seem to come in clusters. Seasons are predictable. But the cycle of death and new life has no rhythm, no predictability; death and life comes when it comes, often at the same time. 

Our friend, Karen, sent a Mary Oliver poem this morning that captures this well, I think. The photo goes with the poem, and is from the Shenandoah National Park from our hike a couple of weeks ago. Here you are:

In Blackwater Woods 

by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
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.

Springtime mysteries and astonishment

Who hasn't seen this yet? Well, maybe some of you. Britain's Susan Boyle who, against all conventional ideas of glitz, has brought the world to their feet cheering with astonishment and delight. This is so worth watching, so please do. Easter is definitely here. The clip has had more than 18 million hits on YouTube, and YouTube has disabled the coding so I can't put the video directly on this blog. Click HERE to see this. 

And when when you return, here is a lovely Mary Oliver poem, sent by our friend Karen in Tennessee, for a gorgeous spring day. The photo is of a Redbud tree at an undisclosed location (the house we are trying to buy) in Charlottesville, taken by me a couple of days ago. Enjoy the day.

Mysteries, Yes
By Mary Oliver

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.