angelbirdflies

“Basho said: avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.” - as paraphrased by Robert Hass Just this. Just this is it. Our opinions, judgements and comparisons are unnecessary. Look how far they’ve gotten us. Why not try a different approach? Love what is. And celebrate the simple fact that we don’t really know what’s going on here. That’s the true leap of love. The vulnerability of the unknown, acknowledged and embraced. Love, no longer relegated to mere preference, resumes its natural function in benevolent welcome to what is... as it is.

Earth. Rock. Desert. I am walking barefoot on sandstone, flesh responding to flesh. It is hot, so hot the rock threatens to burn through the calloused soles of my feet. I must quicken my pace, paying attention to where I step. For as far as I can see, the canyon country of southern Utah extends in all directions. No compass can orient me here, only a pledge to love and walk the terrifying distances before me. What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart. I climb the slickrock on all fours, my hands and feet throbbing with the heat. It feels good to sweat, to be engaged, to inhabit my animal body. . . . Once I enter the Joint Trail . . . it is dark, cool, and narrow with sheer sandstone walls on either side of me. . . . The palms of my h...

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...

“Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the worlds.” Rumi

N ot Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the east or the west, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and  that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.

In 2016 my best friend died of cancer.  I sat at her bedside a few weeks before and said, "Mich, this is not how I thought the story would end."  She pressed my hand, answering, "Neither did I?"  A few weeks later she was gone.  This loss has turned me upside down and inside out.  Not just the loss of my lifelong friend and soulmate-sister but the overwhelming groundlessness accompanying her loss.  Suddenly nothing made sense.  All my belief structures and conceptual models simply collapsed. The only statement I could make with any real conviction was,  "I don't know".  With that there was little left to say.  Little to write.  Little to create. I gave away my loom, my paints, my art boards and supplies.  My well of creativity just ran dry, replaced by an edge of cynicism and apathy.   What would my sister tell me to do? I didn't know.  She was gone.  I couldn't pick up the phone and hear the reassuranc...

Driving to work last week I saw two signs in a nearby yard.  The first read, "Jesus Christ is the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to GOD except through HIM."   The next sign situated in the same yard along the walkway, read, "NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT." Of course, after I laughed aloud at the ironic signage, I was struck by what it unwittingly revealed. All too often religions espouse a monopoly on what is "right" or just and cling to it with closed fists, minds and hearts.  In one yard, two signs provided a perfect metaphor for how the story of Christmas, with it's little family looking for a place to rest and deliver a child, is all to often overlooked.   There is no room at the Inn.  "NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT!"   How often do our beliefs, ideologies and misplaced moralities ward off travelers who are merely looking for refuge or safe harbor?  How often do we think ourselves in possession of the truth and...

Death comes unbidden, like a salesman in the night marketing unwanted wares.  My soul's companion and dearest friend for two-decades died this year. At first grief fell like a torrential downpour, wet with tears.  Next, it arrived in a series of emotional tsunamis leveling everything in its wake. Eventually it settled into the ebb and flow of feeling. Loss is simply there, like a familiar friend who sometimes draws close enough to hold my hand and walk with me awhile before leaving and lifting the heavy mist of sorrow. With my sister's passing, all creativity ran dry.  My verbosity and delight in words simply stopped.  I gave away my paints, put my loom in storage and my notepads gathered dust. I simply had nothing left to say. Words, my long time companions, simply proved insufficient to this part of life's journey. They separate totality into  this  and  that ,  subject  and  object ,  here  and  there , ...

The resolve is to tell the truth. And the deeper truth. And the deeper truth.

Stop looking. Not in the next moment when you have what you are looking for. But now. In this moment. And you will discover that all you have ever sought is what you have been all along.

I have been unable to write. All words seem an unnecessary distraction, inadequate to the expansion back of them and woefully deficient. Loss, grief, confusion, joy, bliss, expansion, contraction, heart ache... all pass through the web of experience ... some linger longer than others. Such is the dance of the human. Perhaps if I add a few words here, the words will break free and give my heart room to breath once more. Save Save

 "Yell into the belly of the Earth", she told me, "she will listen and ease your aching sorrows". I yelled until I was hoarse. I was twenty-one. Burdens fell from careworn shoulders and we were sisters ever more.  The other day a friend entrusted me with a Kabbalistic myth. In the telling, 144 souls were created at the dawn of time. Those 144 souls eventually splintered into the multitudinous fragments of sentient life on planet Earth. Now I look out upon the mosaic of life and believe that my kindred spirits are my clearest reflections of the original soul from which we sprang.   Now she travels the final steps along the sharp, stony terrain of cancer, I walk with her, my heart aching.  I see ahead a field, beautiful and inviting, with tall grass, clear skies, shade trees and a small bubbling creek nearby. There are ample places to rest.  She is tired.  I say, softly, lean on me, we're nearly there. This grief has settled in and it's not wha...

Words. Insufficient, awkward, clumsy tools with which to communicate.  They have all but dried up.  Each one spilling forth is incomplete and one-sided, ill-suited to its task.  Drawing water from an infinite well, they cough wet sand on the surface of things, unable to match wholeness with anything other than division. Ah yes, but these are what we have. My beloved heart-sister, one of the greatest loves of my life, is leaving form and I, with deep tenderness, am breaking open, admitting that I know nothing and yet am so generously known as everything. She freely shared her love with me, year after year, until my own well was discovered to have been full all along. The heart never grows tired of loving, no matter the cost.  It pours love like an inexhaustible river filling the parched places so long tended by words alone. Now, I have no words to offer at this parting.  Each one spills out, empty and inadequate. The heart simply breaks and love spills o...

And then You are like this: A small bird decorated  With orange patches of light  Waving your wings near my window,  Encouraging me with all of existences's love --  To dance.  And then You are like this:  A cruel word that stabs me  From the mouth of a strange costume You wear;  A guise You had too long tricked me into thinking  Could be other -- than You.  And then You are...  The firmament  That spins at the end of a string in Your hand  That You offer to mine saying,  "Did you drop this -- surely  This is yours."  And then You are, O then You are:  The Beloved of every creature  Revealed with such grandeur -- bursting  From each cell in my body,  I kneel, I laugh,  I weep, I sing,  I sing.  -Hafiz

Beauty everywhere, Care in every detail. We imagine ourselves separate, Alone. While all the world is Conspiring, in Simple Wonder... Nothing is excluded.