We always need good friends who listen even when we are unable to speak the words. They have a sense that something is amiss.
Sympathetic ear
Listening without a word
A very good friend
~~ D. R. DiFrancesco ~~
Monthly Archives: January 2014
A Good Friend – Haiku
Today
I looked randomly for a poem today and found this one by Frank O’Hara. It seemed to fit the idea of today and the randomness of it. Getting settled back into a routine of reading and writing is one that brings about a certain feeling of randomness and surprises. There is some beauty in those surprises, just like there is in a poem.
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
Carpe Diem Haiga Festival
The picture is an amazing entrance and exit to the day. I am back in Spokane and there is much promise in the new days ahead. I was drawn to the haiku as I was not familiar with the word maunders. It is a human calling to be curious and learn anew each day.
Carpe Diem Haiku host Chèvrefeuille wrote that haiga is a nice kind of art and poetry, it’s a photo, painting or other kind of image with a haiku, senryu, tanka or kyoka included. The picture and the poem are making eachother stronger or making eachother clearer. Since there is a new special feature called Carpe Diem Haiga Festival, I decided to give it a try…
Culture and the Universe, poem by Simon J. Ortiz
This is a great poem to begin the day with. It is a gentle reminder that we are not alone. There is something bigger than us that we only need to be stop and be quiet and it will find us.
CULTURE AND THE UNIVERSE
by Simon J. Ortiz
Two nights ago
in the canyon darkness,
only the half-moon and stars,
only mere men.
Prayer, faith, love,
existence.
We are measured
by vastness beyond ourselves.
Dark is light.
Stone is rising.
I don’t know
if humankind understands
culture: the act
of being human
is not easy knowledge.
With painted wooden sticks
and feathers, we journey
into the canyon toward stone,
a massive presence
in midwinter.
We stop.
Lean into me.
The universe
sings in quiet meditation.
We are wordless:
I am in you.
Without knowing why
culture needs our knowledge,
we are one self in the canyon.
And the stone wall
I lean upon spins me
wordless and silent
to the reach of stars
and to the heavens within.
It’s not humankind after all
nor is it culture
that limits us.
It is the vastness
we…
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Winter Harvest
I am on the road and took a few minutes to check email. I found this beautiful poem about Sabbath rest and patience. It has such a Zen quality as we sow the seeds of virtue that we need to make the world a better place.
Garden’s winter grave
Snowy soil on Sabbath rest
Patience being sown
Life is about your soul
This is a beautiful question. When was the last time, I paid attention to my soul? It is the hardest thing to do as it requires quiet spaciousness that challenges me to find many days.
“Life is about your soul, not about your body and not about your mind. Most people work hard to keep the body happy. Then they seek to stimulate their mind. Then… if there is time… they look after their soul. Yet the most beneficial priority has it just the other way around… When was the last time you paid attention to your soul?” ~ Neale Donald Walsch
Limen
Some days, I sit and watch, listen, and sense the wonders of the world around me. Within these wonders, things and people invite me to remember things embedded within nature and in my life. The extraordinary emerges from the ordinary. Often, I overlook what and who is important in my life, who give and gave me unconditional support.
Natasha Trethewey shared this wonderful poem about the unobserved industry that goes on around me. It is not just busy industry. I focus on a particular calling in life. I find my voice in the work. For humans, there is a multiplicity in the work and the way it shapes life. Similar to the woodpecker, it seems I look for the gifts I overlook. There is more embedded in life than just hanging laundry and other obvious tasks I undertake. When I attend and am present, the barely perceptible–the liminal– is visible, heard, and fully sensed.
All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,
his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.
She is here, beyond the tree,
its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,
hanging wet sheets on the line–each one
a thin white screen between between us. So insistent
is this woodpecker, I’m sure he must be
looking for something else–not simply
the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold. All day he’s been at work,
tireless, making the green hearts flutter.
These Robins are a bit early
I am looking out the kitchen window at more snow falling and the weather still cold. It is supposed to warm up today. This post is one of hope that spring, in many forms, is just around the corner. The corner is sometimes longer for some than others.
When temperature is hovering around freezing and yesterday’s storm blew the 6 – 7 inches of snow around like a blizzard, Robins are searching for food in my front yard.
At first there was one; then another and then the whole yard where there was no snow or ice, was full of them.
Hopefully they will survive the single digit temps that is supposed to be here for the next few nights.
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
When I let go and awaken to the wonder of the ordinary world, it is love that allows me to see them as more than things and objects. I join those precious people and things in an extraordinary world. Sabbath moments allow this in a world of busyness.
Richard Wilbur wrote this wonderful poem that echoes the Zen Buddhist idea of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
OVER ALL
This is a beautiful poem. It is a reminder, to me at least, the perfection of life somehow emerges from the imperfection of life. It is not lost. I need to be silent, listen more closely to my soul, and let it whisper of this perfection.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 