I had some thoughts come to me while sitting quietly and wanted to share them in the form of a haiku.
ebbing and flowing
each moment’s uniqueness
a tended garden.
Melody Lowes inspired the second poem. She is a wonderful poet, photographer, and gardener. She posted a poem called Baby Steps.
slow is freedom’s flight
a question to live into
gifts of poetry.
As I posted the last two or three blogs, I realized sometimes how little we think of we and we individually think of I. I am often guilty of this. Life experienced is a relational enterprise. I think it does start with the I, but moves out to embrace the Thou in the way writers such as Martin Buber meant. We experience life through relational experiences of I and Thou.
Adrienne Rich provided us with poetry as a daily reminder of “no man being an island.”
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to
But the dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
Take care with those who you are we with and enjoy them today. Have a good 7th of July.
A colleague passed this link on to me and asked I share it. It resonated as I recently posted Naming Values which is similar in theme.
I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but I couldn’t agree more; Life is merely a series of choices. Where you are now can all be linked back to every choice that you’ve made in your life to date. Every day we all make countless choices and each one counts. This is what this short movie is all about via Two Wolves Inside Me Movie.
Enjoy and share.
I read Seven Lessons of Chaos by John Briggs and David Peat last summer. They used a koan about a ‘hole in the whole’ describing what we do when we analyze things and lose the mystery of the wholeness in life. We break life and its events down, analyze them, and forget to put all the pieces back and lose something vital in the connectedness to the world, leaving a “hole in the whole.” Humans attempt to explain the mystery of life and not embrace it and the richness of our existence. Mystery and spirituality work together. We cannot intellectually explain the fullness and mystery of life. Thomas Merton and Shunryu Suzuki spoke of this attempt as human arrogance.
A former student took this picture, again with pretty straightforward phone technology, and the beauty, the richness, and the wholeness it conveyed is powerful. It reminded me of the song we learned as children There is a Hole in My Bucket. The hole in the clouds or bucket could be there for a reason we do not understand. Despite the potential arrogance, I wrote a short poem that might explain the hole.
Sprinting, scrambling, scurrying
Hoping, praying
Feeling hard, cold raindrops
Burning through my clothes
Smelling rain and fear.
Suddenly, blue and gold in the blackness
A light shone
A candle gently flickering.
I whispered, “Thank God!”
I am startled by a voice
“Are you OK, Ivon?”
“I think so.”
“Is that you God?”
“Is the hole to find my way?”
“By the way, thanks for asking. Are you OK?”
A pause
I thought a heard a smile
A sigh for sure, before
“I am now.”
Silence returned
Not falling, just silent
Embracing, reassuring, supporting,
Opening my eyes,
I looked up
I was home
A light shone through the window,
A second haven
Warm, well-lit, welcoming
With voices asking, “Are you OK?”
Saying, “We were worried.”
I wonder if we ever wonder if God is OK?
We should ask every now, and
Listen quietly in the storm for an answer,
It is there.
One of my students took these pictures and allowed me the privilege of posting them along with a Haiku. She is using her new phone and this butterfly felt drawn to her finger and hand.
Rest on my finger
Unifying quietly
The peaceful soul rests.
stop on the way home
butterfly rests on human
pause on the journey.
Some days, when I sit to write, I find it hard to start and this poem by Mary Oliver came to me this morning.
I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think–
no, you will realize–
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your own heart
had been saying.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts through comments and making my words more than just my words.
Kathy and I stopped as we passed through Brocket Alberta which is between Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek on the way to Spokane. I took these pictures with the camera on my PDA. Brocket is the home to the Pikani First Nation or the Peigan Nation.
Mountains,sky, clouds
A backdrop
Winged machines
March across the prairie
Product of human hand
Point us towards
A river
Seemingly without pattern, yet poetic
Finding its way, as planned
By unseen hands
Of A Creator.
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
To be present and aware in the world is a rare gift. Here is a gift from William Stafford.
Enjoy.
Teacher as Transformer 