Stephen Levine

Millennium Blessing – Stephen Levine

There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
          but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us to surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
          beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
          none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
          and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.

(photo Rose Cook)

Waiting – Leza Lowitz

You keep waiting for something to happen,
the thing that lifts you out of yourself,

catapults you into doing all the things you’ve put off
the great things you’re meant to do in your life,

but somehow never quite get to.
You keep waiting for the planets to shift

the new moon to bring news,
the universe to align, something to give.

Meanwhile, the pile of papers, the laundry, the dishes the job —
it all stacks up while you keep hoping

for some miracle to blast down upon you,
scattering the piles to the winds.

Sometimes you lie in bed, terrified of your life.
Sometimes you laugh at the privilege of waking.

But all the while, life goes on in its messy way.
And then you turn forty. Or fifty. Or sixty…

and some part of you realizes you are not alone
and you find signs of this in the animal kingdom —

when a snake sheds its skin its eyes glaze over,
it slinks under a rock, not wanting to be touched,

and when caterpillar turns to butterfly
if the pupa is brushed, it will die —

and when the bird taps its beak hungrily against the egg
it’s because the thing is too small, too small,

and it needs to break out.
And midlife walks you into that wisdom

that this is what transformation looks like —
the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life,

the yearning and writhing and pushing,
until one day, one day

you emerge from the wreck
embracing both the immense dawn

and the dusk of the body,
glistening, beautiful

just as you are.

 

 

Photo Rose Cook

The Buddha’s Last Instruction – Mary Oliver

  

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

  

from House of Light by Mary Oliver

photo Rose Cook

I Dare You – Dorianne Laux

Its autumn, and we’re getting rid  of books, getting ready to retire,  to move some place smaller, more  manageable. We’re living in reverse,  age-proofing the new house, nothing  on the floors to trip over, no hindrances  to the slowed mechanisms of our bodies,  a small table for two. Our world is  shrinking, our closets mostly empty,  gone the tight skirts and dancing shoes,  the bells and whistles. Now, when  someone comes to visit and admires  our complete works of Shakespeare,  the hawk feather in the open dictionary,  the iron angel on a shelf, we say  take them. This is the most important  time of all, the age of divestment,  knowing what we leave behind is  like the fragrance of blossoming trees  that grows stronger after  you’ve passed them, breathing  them in for a moment before  breathing them out. An ordinary  Tuesday when one of you says  I dare you, and the other one  just laughs.

photo Rose Cook

Quote from Mary Oliver

One morning

the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,

and didn’t see me—and I thought:

 

so this is the world.

I’m not in it.

It is beautiful.

Photo by Rose Cook

Gift by Czesław Miłosz

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

Wait – Galway Kinnell

Wait

by Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

 

---

Photo Rose Cook

Inupiaq Women by dg nanouk okpik

She paddles and streams  her kayak up Kobuck River. At daybreak,  she passes the salt flats into   the glass water; she skims  for cod and chum,          hand over oar,             hand over oar,  ripples tightening the drawstring on her parka. A taffeta of cold air hits her cheeks; they are sun- wind chapped, a sign of Inupiaq women subsisting for their young families. In body, in Inuit, she thrives on the bleakest ecstatic love. Here on her knees, in her seal skin buoyant boat, her duties of her village complete, she knows her place among the caribou  women. She knows her children  with their earphones on,  while playing video games,  will not follow her in the knowledge of ice,  dressing a caribou, preparing dry-fish,  jarring jellies, dip netting hooligans,  purse netting whitefish, tracking  and setting traps for marmot, squirrels, arctic fox and wolverines. She thinks  of the children, hand over oar;  they will stay at the village, carve  for cleaving water with Inupiat hands.

Copyright © 2022 by dg nanouk okpik. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

The moment I die

I will try to come back to you

as quickly as possible.

I promise it will not take long.

Isn’t it true

I am already with you

as I die each moment?

I come back to you

in every moment.

Just look,

feel my presence.

If you want to cry,

please cry,

And Know

that I will cry with you.

The tears you shed

will heal us both.

Your tears and mine.

The earth I tread this morning

transcends history.

Spring and Winter are both present in the moment.

The young leaf and the old leaf are really one.

My feet touch deathlessness,

And my feet are yours.

Walk with me now.

Let us enter the dimension of oneness

and see the cherry tree blossom in Winter.

Why should we talk about death?

I don’t need to die

to be back with you.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

 

 

 

died 24 January 2022

Hope and Love by Jane Hirshfield

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one-
not knowing even
that was what he did-
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.