The River Still Flows
At the River Clarion (continued)
by Mary Oliver
5.
My dog Luke lies in a
grave in the forest,
she is given back.
But the river Clarion still
flows
from wherever it come
from
to where it has been
told to go.
I pray for the desperate
earth.
I pray for the desperate
world.
I do the little each person
can do, it isn’t much.
Sometimes the river
murmurs, sometimes it
raves.
Then We Give Back
At the River Clarion (continued)
by Mary Oliver
4.
There was someone I loved who grew
old and ill.
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do
except to remember
that we receive
then we give back.
We Do Not Live in a Simple World
At the River Clarion (continued)
by Mary Oliver
3.
Of course for each of us, there is the
daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we
not give it thanks?
And should we not thank the knife
also?
We do not live in a simple world.
Delight Beyond Measure
I thought I’d continue from where I left off yesterday, with section 2 of “At the River Clarion” by Mary Oliver. (There are 7 sections in all. Stay tuned.)
At the River Clarion (continued)
by Mary Oliver
2.
If God exists he isn’t just butter and
good luck.
He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful
dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you
can imagine, then
keep on going.
Imagine how the lily (who may also be
a part of God)
would sing to you if it could sing, if
you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway
that it doesn’t sing?
If God exists he isn’t just churches and
mathematics.
He’s the forest, He’s the desert.
He’s the ice caps, that are dying.
He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine
Arts.
He’s van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and
Robert
Motherwell.
He’s the many desperate hands, cleaning
and preparing
their weapons.
He’s every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician,
the poet.
And if this is true, isn’t it something
very important?
Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of
God, and
each of you too, or at least
of his intention and his hope.
Which is a delight beyond measure.
I don’t know how you get to suspect
such an idea.
I only know that the river kept
singing.
It wasn’t a persuasion, it was all the
river’s own
constant joy
which is better by far than a lecture,
which was
comfortable, exciting, unforgettable.
***
(image by Robert Motherwell)
And I Too
It feels like a good day for a little Mary Oliver.
At the River Clarion
by Mary Oliver
1.
I don’t know who God is exactly. But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion,
on a
water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices
of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck the stone it
had
something to say,
and the water itself, and even the
mosses trailing
under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became
clear to me
what they were saying.
Said the river: I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too
whispered
the moss beneath the water.
I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened
quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour
or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood
has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway,
through
all the traffic, and ambition.
And Still, Things Change
For today, one of “Twelve Pebbles” from The Beauty, by Jane Hirshfield:
A map open on one table, a guidebook on the other
‘I am here.
I want to be nowhere but here’,
says the still hanging apricot,
growing rounder
like a page from Lewis Carroll.
***
(image by Gail Siptak)
I, too, am Asleep in America
I bought a new iPhone yesterday (Rose Gold, very chic) because my old iPhone wouldn’t synch with my new Mac Pro, which I had to get because my old Mac Pro couldn’t run the latest version of Skype and the video kept freezing up on me, and it wouldn’t run the latest version of Quicken so I was worried about losing tech support, and Google docs kept showing me a little dinosaur image telling me that I needed to upgrade to a newer browser, but I couldn’t because my Mac Pro was too old.
All this…while the school system in the city of St. Louis, where I live, is in shambles; while there are homeless people living under the highway overpass I drive on when I go to the Symphony…and, of course, while there is Ferguson.
America
by Tony Hoagland
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in a dream last night,
It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and–this is the weird part–,
He gasped, “Thank god–those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart–
And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”–
Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,
And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
Let the Room Hold Them
Jack Kornfield was one of the teachers at the CDL training retreat I attended. He said that as Community Dharma Leaders, we may be called upon to perform weddings, funerals, blessings, rites of passage, dedication ceremonies, baby blessings, and many other types of rituals to mark significant events in the lives of our sangha members. So he taught us the elements that make up these rituals and then we practiced a few of them.
The most moving was the most simple: a grief ritual, in which we each went out into the desert to collect a stone for someone we wanted to honor — someone who had died or who had suffered a great loss — and then we brought the stone back into the hall, where we each knelt and placed it on a small table, in the middle of which Jack had lit a candle. (See photo above)
No official words were spoken. We simply sat together in a sacred silence.
In honor of which I offer:
In a Room with Five People, Six Griefs
by Jane Hirshfield
In a room with five people, six griefs.
Some you will hear of, some not.
Let the room hold them, their fears, their anger.
Let there be walls and windows, a ceiling.
A door through which time
changer of everything
can enter.
Yes! And Yes!
At the Community Dharma Leader (CDL) training retreat I just attended, we spent a lot of time working with–and trying to find our own words for–Nagarjuna’s teaching on the Two Truths, as expressed in a collection of poems titled, Verses from the Center.
Here’s an excerpt from Jay Garfield’s translation:
The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma
Is based on two truths:
A truth of worldly convention
And an ultimate truth.
Those who do not understand
The distinction between these two truths
Do not understand
The Buddha’s profound teaching.
Without a foundation in the conventional truth
The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,
Liberation is not achieved.
Here’s my take:
Things are as they are.
But there are 2 “are”s.
Is light a wave
Or a particle?
Yes!
Is the world real
Or a dream?
Yes!
Is it “me” who writes this
Or is it “not me”?
Yes!
How do I know that the answer is
Yes?
I see the
Light;
I know the
World.
And when I write,
It’s “me” who knows that
It’s “not me” who says
Yes!
The Opposite of That
In Buddhist psychology, equanimity is understood to be one of the “universal, beautiful factors of mind,” which always arise together in every wholesome mind state…along with confidence, mindfulness, a sense of dignity, non-greed, non-hatred, and non-rigidity.
In Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, Joseph Goldstein writes, “For most of us, there is a deep conditioning in the mind to try to hold on to what is pleasant and to push away or avoid what is unpleasant. But it is precisely this conditioning that powers the rollercoaster of hope and fear….When equanimity is developed, we ride these waves with balance and ease.”
Which is exactly the opposite of what Tony Hoagland writes about here (so beautifully…and yet so painfully):
Personal
by Tony Hoagland
Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal–
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain–
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk
Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts
but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
belive in the clean break;
I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,
I belive in saying it all
and taking it all back
and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries
like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.
Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?
You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.
I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:
trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.