How long does it take to make the woods?

How long does it take to make the woods?

As long as it takes to make the world.

The woods is present as the world is, the presence

of all its past and of all its time to come.

It is always finished, it is always being made, the act

of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,

expecting nothing, remembering nothing,

into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.

Wendell Berry

To Learn From Animal Being

Nearer to the earth's heart,

Deeper within its silence:

Animals know this world

In a way we never will.

We who are ever

Distanced and distracted

By the parade of bright

Windows thought opens:

Their seamless presence

Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time

Gone and time emerging,

We manage seldom

To be where we are:

Whereas they are always

Looking out from

The here and now.

May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked minds,

And with freed senses

Feel the earth

Breathing with us.

May we enter

Into lightness of spirit,

And slip frequently into

The feel of the wild.

Let the clear silence

Of our animal being

Cleanse our hearts

Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk

Upon the earth

With all their confidence

And clear-eyed stillness

So that our minds

Might be baptized

In the name of the wind

And the light and the rain.

John O'Donohue

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books --

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Metempsychosis

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off --
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

Jane Hirshfield

Photo:  Peter Bowers

I Want to Write Something So Simply

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.

Mary Oliver

i thank You God for most this amazing

              i thank You God for most this amazing

day;for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes.

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any--lifted from the no

of all nothing--human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings

Thanksgiving

More than these greens tossed with toasted pecans,

I want to serve you the hymn I sung into the wooden bowl

as I blended the oil and white vinegar.  More than honey ice cream

beside the warm pie, I want to serve you the bliss in the apples' flesh,

how it gathered the sun and carried its luminousness to this table.

More than the popovers, the risen ecstasy of wheat, milk and eggs,

I want to serve you the warmth that urged the transformation to bread.

Blessings, I want to serve you full choruses of hallelujah, oh so wholly

here in this moment.  Oh so holy here in this world.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

There are no words for the deepest things

There are no words for the deepest things.  Words become feeble when mystery visits and prayer moves into silence.  In post-modern culture the ceaseless din of chatter has killed our acquaintance with silence.  Consequently, we are stressed and anxious.  Silence is a fascinating presence.  Silence is shy; it is patient and never draws attention to itself.  Without the presence of silence, no word could ever be said or heard.  Our thoughts constantly call up new words.  We become so taken with words that we barely notice the silence, but the silence is always there.  The best words are born in the fecund silence that minds the mystery. 

As Seamus Heaney writes in Clearances,  "Beyond silence listened for..."   When the raft of prayer leaves the noisy streams of words and thoughts, it enters the still lake of silence.  At this point, you become aware of the tranquility that lives within you.  Beneath your actions, gestures and thoughts, there is a silent tranquility. 






John O'Donohue
photo:  Peter Bowers

How to be a Poet (to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down.  Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill - more of each
 than you have - inspiration,

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity.  Any readers

who like your work,

doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditioned breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly.  Live

a three-dimensional life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of that silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

Wendell Berry

photo:  Peter Bowers

The Poet

moves forward

to that edge

but lives sensibly,

through the senses

not because of them.

Above all he watches

where he steps.

As if it matters

where he leaves his prints.

The senses overwhelm him

at his peril.

Though he must be taken

by something greater.

That is what he uses

senses to perceive.

The poet's

task is simple

He looks for quiet,

and speaks to what

he finds there. 

But like Blake
in his engraving shop, works
with the fierceness
of acid on metal.

Melting apparent
surfaces away
and displaying
the infinite
which was hid.

In the early morning
he listens
by the window,
makes
the first utterance
and tries to overhear
himself
say something,
from which
in that silence,
it is impossible to retreat. 

David Whyte

photo:  Peter Bowers

Farewell Letter

She wrote me a letter

after her death

and I remember

a kind of happy light

falling on the envelope

as I sat by the rose tree,

on her old bench

at the back door,

so surprised by its arrival,

wondering what she would say,

looking up before I could open it

and laughing to myself

in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time

for me to leave you.

I am afraid that the words

you are used to hearing

are no longer mine to give,

they are gone and mingled

back in the world

where it is no longer

in my power

to be their first

original author

nor their last

loving bearer.

You can hear

motherly

words of affection now

only from your own mouth

and only

when you speak them

to those who stand

motherless

before you.

As for me I must forsake

adulthood

and be bound gladly

to a new childhood.

You must understand

this apprenticeship

demands of me

an elemental innocence

from everything

I ever held in my hands.

I know your generous soul

is well able to let me go,

you will in the end

be happy to know

my God was true

and I find myself

after loving you all so long,

in the wide,

infinite mercy

of being mothered myself.

P.S.  All your intuitions were true. 



David Whyte

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat

of the sweet grass?

Will the owl bite off its own wings?

Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or

forget to sing?

Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold

the reliability and the finery and the teachings

of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water, and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

  are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are

thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

3.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's more than the beating of the single heart.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life - just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.

4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.

6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure -
your life -
what would do for you?

7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another.)

And I have become the child of clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.



Mary Oliver
from Evidence
photo:  Peter Bowers