Birds for leaves, and leaves for birds.
The tawny yellow mulberry leaves
are always goldfinches tumbling
across the lawn like extreme elation.
The last of the maroon crabapple
ovates are song sparrows that tremble
all at once. And today, just when I
could not stand myself any longer,
a group of field sparrows, that were
actually field sparrows, flew up into
the bare branches of the hackberry
and I almost collapsed: leaves
reattaching themselves to the tree
like a strong spell for reversal. What
I have an interest in the word "you" — the address that intimates use for each other, that yearning we might have, that sense of addressing self, other, Other, the void, the past, the unknown, the deeply known. That word allows me spaciousness without definition, and I like it, so I regularly repeat the word "you", in Irish, with the in and out of breath, until I've forgotten who is speaking and who is being addressed. ("The eye with which I see God / is the eye with which I see myself", my bewildering friend Meister Eckhart says.)
...this is the passing of all shining things
no lingering no backward-
wondering be unto
us O
soul, but straight
glad feet fearruining
and glorygirded
faces
lead us
into the
serious
steep
darkness
What do we do with suffering? As far as I can see, we have two choices — we either transform our suffering into something else, or we hold on to it, and eventually pass it on.
O Holy Spirit, you are the mighty way in which everything that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, is penetrated with possibility, so that all may be sustained by you.
Awake at night
while others sleep
I watch meteors fall
in glittering array,
inscrutable patterns.
Multiple fiery tails
each minute
brush the cold black
sky, sweep the cave
of my heart.
I cannot decipher the
hieroglyph of meteors,
except one passage
repeated, descending:
In zero g, space fragments
drift, invisible to human eyes.
But mesmerized by gravity,
meteors burst through
Earth's atmosphere and blaze
a firetrail across the sky:
What if we reframed "living with uncertainty" to "navigating mystery"? There's more energy in that phrase... But to navigate mystery is not the same thing as living with uncertainty ...Navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don't know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.
As humans we've long been forged on the anvil of mysteries: Why are we here? Why do we die? What is love? We are tuned like a cello to vibrate with such questions.
Humanity—in fact, the entire Earth community—currently exists in such dire circumstances that the most significant, viable, and potent solutions will seem like impossible dreams to most everyone (at first). But this is apparently the way it has always been in our universe. At the greatest moments of transformations—what Thomas Berry calls "moments of grace"—the "impossible" happens....