angelbirdflies

A beautiful poem of self loving forgiveness to self...  “Phase One” by Dilruba Ahmed: “For leaving the fridge open last night, I forgive you. For conjuring white curtains instead of living your life. For the seedlings that wilt, now, in tiny pots, I forgive you. For saying no first but yes as an afterthought. I forgive you for hideous visions after childbirth, brought on by loss of sleep. And when the baby woke repeatedly, for your silent rebuke in the dark, “What’s your beef?” I forgive your letting vines overtake the garden. For fearing your own propensity to love. For losing, again, your bag en route from San Francisco; for the equally heedless drive back on the caffeine-fueled return. I forgive you for leaving windows open in rain and soaking library books again. For putting forth only revisions of yourself, with punctuation worked over, instead of the disordered truth, I forgive you. For singing mostly when the shower drowns your voice. For so admiring the drummer you failed t...

Summer time and the living is easy, Fish are jumping and the cotton is high, Your mama is rich and your Daddy's good looking (this is dad's version) So hush now baby, Don't you cry. One of these mornings, You're gonna rise up singing, You’re gonna spread your wings and you'll take to the sky. But until that morning, There ain't nothing can harm you, With your daddy and your mammy standing by. This was my all-time favorite lullaby.  Sung in dad's gravely voice it carried me to sleep with visions of flight. By the time I was four I knew that my mammy and daddy weren't gonna keep standing by .  So I did what any rational four year old would do, I made up my mind to fly.  I asked Dad about it and he answered, "You can do anything you want if you believe in yourself enough kid."   Well okay then. Our house sat atop a steep hill with a concrete drive, sloping like the metal slides that once populated playgrou...

Some days I need the warmth of connection more than others and when I do it often arrives from unexpected sources: the flight of a cooper hawk low in the sky, a deer’s quiet contemplations, a bluebird on the trail ahead or a loved ones words returned to me.  Today was such a day and I welcomed each offering in turn.  So when a friend extended a story that had brightened her day, I wasn’t surprised to find my dads oft repeated wisdom contained within... As a kid I often worried about what to do and who I’d become in the topsy turvy landscape of human experience.  When I asked my dad about it he told me the story of the two wolves and finished saying, "Don't worry about what to do kid, feed the wolf you want to be and the rest will take care of itself.”  Two wolves  A member of the community goes to an elder: “I am trying to find my way, but I am struggling with the path and within myself.” The elder explains, “Inside each of us, there are two wolves which fight a...

This has been a year of farewells. Dad dying. Son number one off to college. Son number too growing up fast. A body being quirky. But through it all I've had a friend, a ponderosa pine tree. Odd? Maybe.  But I visited it as frequently as any bestie would, walking the requisite three miles up apex trail to sit in its low branches, breathing in the vanilla-orange-pine scent of its bark beneath an umbrella of cones and needles.  Today I bundled up and hiked an hour for our visit only to discover that a fire had blazed along a small stretch of trail in my absence, taking my tree with it.  I stood beneath blackened branches with tears on my face.  Tears for my tree, for my dad and all the changes in a life. Not because there’s anything wrong with change or unnatural about fires, both are necessary and contribute to the health of the system. No I grieved because my friend was gone and I would miss it. Because this tree of all the trees on the trail had become dear to me. W...

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

Another day has begun.  I have lit my candles and incense.  Sat in silence. Worked up a sweat at the gym.  Eaten breakfast.  Straightened house.  Answered mail and dropped my man off at the airport. It is eight in the morning and the world stirs with wakefulness.  The sun climbs in the sky.  The birds sing.  The squirrels chip and chur in tree branches.  A dog barks.  And I look with dull eyes at the long day ahead, contemplating a single phrase, "My father is dead." What strange words. My father is dead. The man has been leaving for as long as I can remember and yet his death robs the wind from my lungs.  My chest throbs and throat tightens.  He isn't coming back. My mom and dad had slipped out of one another's lives before I'd barely begun mine.  Two weekends a month my brothers and I stood on a saggy porch, bags packed, eager for our hero to arrive in his old blue Ford to pick us up.  We vibrated with hope...

“There are no shortcuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, ‘I am all of the above.’”  Parker Palmer 

Back when I was guru hopping, I went to see yet another visiting, living saint in my hair-on-fire pursuit of... what was I pursuing? I don't even remember. Enlightenment? Freedom from suffering?  Some hoped for supreme good-enoughness. When I arrived the sanctuary was draped in flowers and shrouded in silence.  All the devotees were gnawing on greens and clad in white with a sort of pained, trying-hard-to-be-spiritual expression that looked more like constipation combined with penitent guilt and sadness, overlaid with a thin smile.  In a very short time I realized I needed to leave before I began stripping down to sexy nothingness, swigging whiskey and cursing like a sailor in some existential rant to balance the multitudes. For all the seekers out there, I have a gentle and groundbreaking reminder... there is no spiritual journey... no far shore on which to arrive... T H I S   I S   I T. I know that pisses the mind off. F**k you Angelina! Minds are con...

“I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood and sisterhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that. And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to humankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. [...] and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking th...

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 ...

“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