To Marvel At

Be like the wing on the way to the party

that can lift yourself and others.

Expectations, let them serve you, until the

present is always enough to marvel at. 

Rumi 

Photo:  Peter Bowers 

...the future unknown...

i.

The calendar all booked up, the future unknown.

The cable silently hums some folk song

but lacks a country.  Snow falls in the gray sea.  Shadows

fight out on the dock. 

ii.

Halfway through your life, death turns up

and takes your pertinent measurements.  We forget

the visit.  Life goes on.  But someone is sewing 

the suit in silence.  

Tomas Transtromer

translation:  Robert Bly 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

I happened to be standing

I don't know where prayers go,

or what they do.

Do cats pray, while they sleep

half-asleep in the sun?

Does the opossum pray as it 

crosses the street?

The sunflowers?  The old black oak

growing older every year?

I know I can walk through the world,

along the shore or under the trees,

with my mind filled with things

of little importance, in full

self-attendance.  A condition I can't really

call being alive.

Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,

or does it matter?

The sunflowers blaze, maybe that's their way.

Maybe the cats are sound asleep.  Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing

just outside my door, with my notebook open, 

which is the way I begin every morning.

Then a wren in the privet began to sing.

He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, 

I don't know why.  And yet, why not.

I wouldn't persuade you from whatever you believe

or whatever you don't .  That's your business.

But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be

if it isn't a prayer?

So I just listened, my pen in the air.  

Mary Oliver

For Freedom

As a bird soars high

In the free holding of the wind,

Clear of the certainty of ground,

Opening the imagination of wings

Into the grace of emptiness

To fulfill new voyagings,

May your life awaken

To the call of its freedom.

As the ocean absolves itself

Of the expectation of land,

Approaching only

In the form of waves

That fill and pleat and fall

With such gradual elegance

As to make of the limit

A sonorous threshold

Whose music echoes back along

The give and strain of memory,

Thus may your heart know the patience

That can draw infinity from limitation.

As the embrace of the earth

Welcomes all we call death,

Taking deep into itself

The tight solitude of a seed, 

Allowing it time

To shed the grip of former form

And to give way to a deeper generosity

That will one day send it forth,

A tree into springtime,

May all that holds you

Fall from its hungry ledge

Into the fecund surge of your heart. 

John O'Donohue

Photo:  Peter Bowers

On Christmas Eve

I salute you.  I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.
There is nothing I can give you which you have not.
But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take heaven !

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.
Take peace !
The gloom of the world is but a shadow.
Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
There is a radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see.
And to see, we have only to look.
I beseech you to look !

Life is so generous a giver.
But we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as
ugly or heavy or hard.
Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor,
woven of love by wisdom, with power.

Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you.
Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me,
that angel's hand is there.
The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence.
Your joys, too, be not content with them as joys.
They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering,
that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.
Courage then to claim it; that is all!
But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together,
wending through unknown country home.

And so, at this time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greetings,
but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and
forever, the day breaks and shadows flee away.





Fra Giovanni
(1435 - 1515)
letter written to Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi on Christmas Eve 1513

Millennium Blessing

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 insistent grace that draws us

to the edge and beckons us 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.

Stephen Levine

Photo:  Peter Bowers

For Absence

May you know that absence is alive with hidden

presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life grow full of eternal 

echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere

where the presences that have left you dwell.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow

of presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never 

hear from.

May you have the courage to speak for the excluded

ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject

of your own life.

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle

words or false belonging.  

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and

twilight are one. 

May your longing inhabit its dreams within the 

Great Belonging.

John O'Donohue 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

A Message From Space

Everything that happens is the message:

you read an event and be one and wait,

like breasting a wave, all the while knowing

by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna - a dish

aimed at stars - and they themselves are its message, 

crawling in and out, being worlds that loom, 

dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up

eye and ear - suddenly we fall into

sound before it begins, the breathing

so still it waits there under the breath - 

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills

where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied

stillness unfolding their careful words:

"Everything counts.  The message is the world."

William Stafford

Photo:  Peter Bowers 

The Task

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.

We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair - 

a robe unfurled

in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task

we've taken on,

though also vast; 

from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not

be blinded by the praising.

To lie like a cat in hot

sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;

and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch

within the deep rooms of the house,

where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms. 

Jane Hirshfield

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against, 

A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, 

Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.

It doesn't need to hold you down. 

It doesn't need anything.

Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,

And disappears when it wants to.

You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house

And now live over a quarry of noise and dust

Cannot make you unhappy.

Everything has a life of its own,

It too could wake up filled with possibilities

Of coffee cake and ripe peaches,

And love even the floor which needs to be swept,

The soiled linens and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough

To contain so much happiness,

You shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you

Into everything you touch.  You are not responsible.

You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit

For the moon, but continue to hold it, and to share it,

And in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Half Life

We walk through half our life

as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open

our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are

we watch the ghost of us drift

from room to room

through friends and lovers

never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean

or meaning half we say

we dream ourselves

from birth to birth

seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks

and the heart can not abide

a moment longer

as the rest of us awakens,

summoned from the dream,

not half caring for anything but love. 

Stephen Levine

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Two Loves

I have two Loves.

Sisters.

One is Immanence,

The other, Transcendence.

Loving each more than words can say,

I fear I cannot Live

Without either of them,

Even as one slowly...slips...away.

Growing older, I'm as a man on a train,

My Love on the platform, gazing wistfully.

Our certain parting,

Making Her more Beautiful than I can bear.

For some time now, I've seen Her everywhere,

Breathed Her, Heard Her voice in every sound,

Felt Her beneath my feet as I walk,

And Her warmth as sunlight upon my face.

This Knowing, that I'll not long be with Her,

A Poignancy, near unbearable,

Rather than diminishing our time, Enriches

Every...precious...moment.

As Life lurches forward, I hold Her closely.

But Vanishing Time, ever more so,

Allows only our Hearts to touch.

All that has ever...really...mattered.

I see Her still, our touch endures,

For how long, I do not know.

Her Perfume still surrounds me,

For how long, I do not know.

And yet...even as I leave one Love,

Arriving at another, in a time not known,

There is no place, within or without,

Where one ends...and the other begins.

No place where She ends,

and She begins.

No place where I end,

And I begin.

I leave, without moving,

From my Love,

To my Love,

As my Love.

Beloved Immanence,

Appearing within, 

And as,

My Beloved Transcendence. 

Chuck Surface

Photo:  Peter Bowers

As Shams Was to Me... (or You Are a Lion ! )

A sheep who had just lost her lamb was in grief, and 

the fullness of milk throbbed heavy within.  And she

prayed the best she could, in her sheep soul, for help.

Soon after that, she came across a lion cub, all alone

and near dying.  Although the scent of him triggered

every warning to her, 

her grief was so great to have a beloved near, and one 

who could bring release of the building pressure in

her glands, that she lay down beside him.

And after a while, he began to suckle her, and they

and God smiled in unison.

Strong, the young cub became, and he was accepted

into the flock by most, always reflecting their traits.

He even developed a passable baa.

About a year went by, when then a real lion came upon

the herd, and saw one of his own eating grass and 

thinking it was a timid creature.

So the aged lion said to his kin, "Brother, what has

happened to you, acting like that?  You have completely

identified with something you are not.

Come down to the lake with me, we will look into

it together.  It will be our mirror.  You will see you

are just like me, a great and powerful king."

Yes, that is the role of the Teacher, as Shams was to

me - showing the one who they are, so they can stop

bleating, crying at the night, and never again be afraid.  

Rumi 

tranlation by Daniel Ladinsky