angelbirdflies

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. -Wendell Berry 

THE TRUELOVE by David Whyte There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world. Years ago in the Hebrides, I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals, who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water, and I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly so Biblically but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love so that when w...

If I were a cinnamon peeler  I would ride your bed  And leave the yellow bark dust  On your pillow.  Your breasts and shoulders would reek  You could never walk through markets  without the profession of my fingers  floating over you. The blind would  stumble certain of whom they approached though you might bathe  under rain gutters, monsoon.  Here on the upper thigh  at this smooth pasture  neighbour to you hair  or the crease  that cuts your back. This ankle.  You will be known among strangers  as the cinnamon peeler's wife. I could hardly glance at you  before marriage  never touch you  --your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.  I buried my hands  in saffron, disguised them  over smoking tar,  helped the honey gatherers...  When we swam once  I touched you in the water  and our bodies remained free,  you could hold me and be blind of smell. ...

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” – Mary Oliver

LOVE AFTER LOVE by Derek Walcott The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, 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.

Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind  as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it. The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see  their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust.   The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey.  These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth  to take their hunger. An offering, one hopes,   made quickly, and without much suffering.  The chair mourns an angry sitter. The lamp, a scalded moth.  A table, the weight of years of argument.  We know this, though we forget.  Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.  Nor the worm, content in its windowless world  of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.  The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.  Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,  looking down at all of u...

This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you. -Hafiz

I’m an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it’s also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars. -Diane Ackerman

THE BIG PICTURE by Ellen Bass I try to look at the big picture.  The sun, ardent tongue licking us like a mother besotted  with her new cub, will wear itself out.  Everything is transitory. Think of the meteor  that annihilated the dinosaurs. And before that, the volcanoes of the Permian period — all those burnt ferns  and reptiles, sharks and bony fish — that was extinction on a scale that makes our losses look like a bad day at the slots.  And perhaps we’re slated to ascend to some kind of intelligence that doesn’t need bodies, or clean water, or even air.  But I can’t shake my longing for the last six hundred Iberian lynx with their tufted ears,  Brazilian guitarfish, the 4 percent of them still cruising the seafloor, eyes staring straight up.  And all the newborn marsupials — red kangaroos, joeys the size of honeybees — steelhead trout, river dolphins, all we can save  so many species of frogs  breathing through their  damp...

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 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

Tell  me, love, what I need right now so that I  might sing, and be alive, as my every cell craves. Tell me, dear, what I need right now, but in a manner I won’t soon forget. Then the world began to sway, its hips invited my arms, its feet placed mine upon them, that made all my effort easy. A father’s toes lifting a child’s in dance caused God to pull out a drum. The Beloved belted out a tune, that went, “Nothing to follow . . . for I will move you. You need not do a damn thing . . . just laugh.” Hafiz, “In a Manner I Won’t Forget,” from  A Year with Hafiz , translation by Daniel Ladinsky

A Gift Of Gratitude  by Brother David Steindl-Rast    You think this is just another day in your  life?  It’s not just another day; it’s the one day that is given to you… today It’s  given  to you. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift that you have right now, and the one appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day of your life, and the very last day, then you will have spent this day  very well. Begin by  opening  your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open, that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment. Look  at the sky. We so rarely look at the sky. We so rarely note how different it is from  moment to moment  with clouds coming and going. We just think of the weather, and even of the weather we don’t think of all the many nuances of...

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH By Maya Angelou  We, this people, on a small and lonely planet Traveling through casual space Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns To a destination where all signs tell us It is possible and imperative that we learn A brave and startling truth  And when we come to it To the day of peacemaking When we release our fingers From fists of hostility And allow the pure air to cool our palms  When we come to it When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean When battlefields and coliseum No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters Up with the bruised and bloody grass To lie in identical plots in foreign soil  When the rapacious storming of the churches The screaming racket in the temples have ceased When the pennants are waving gaily When the banners of the world tremble Stoutly in the good, clean breeze  When we come to it When we let the rifles fall from our...

SINGULARITY by Marie Howe            (after Stephen Hawking) Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money —  nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you.    Remember? There was no    Nature .    No   them .   No tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf    or if  the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French; would that we could wake up   to what we were — when we  were  ocean    and before that  to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all — nothing before we came to believe...

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies  are not starving someplace, they are starving  somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.  But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.  Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not  be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not  be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women  at the fountain are laughing together between  the suffering they have known and the awfulness  in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody  in the village is very sick. There is laughter  every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,  and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.  If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,  we lessen the importance of their deprivation.  We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,  but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have  the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless  furnace of this ...

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made sing his being simply by being the thing it is: stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made, means a storm of peace. Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone trying to will himself into a stillness where God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made there is given one shade shaped exactly to the thing itself: under the tree a darker tree; under the man the only man to see God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. A part of what man knows, apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made. BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving, I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts. I pressed my face as close to the pane as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind  haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards. Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would (but why should it seem fuller now?) and though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider-- lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe-- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep...

Within me there is a pool, deep and blue.  It calls.  Beneath noisy chatter, Echoed within white walls of self. A whispered voice, Wordlessly beckons to its edge.  I approach. Tears flow, A flood without an ark.  Release. Unknot this tight web of "me", stitch by stitch, holding self together.  Fear, Retreat from clear waters To hurried world of "do",  "prove", "achieve", "seek", Isolated in activity, Waxen and cold.  I ache to breathe, Against the armor of "self".  I ache to fall, Without thought of time, Into deep waters, Dissolving in space, Floating on presence,  Breath breathing breath, One.