angelbirdflies

Seek-sorrow I learned an ancient word today. Such a beautiful, sad word: Seek-sorrow. ​ There are those who, in their quest for reality, See only the wound, but not the healing skin beneath. They immerse in the infinite misery that besets us And cannot open ears or eyes to the speckled joys that also share our world. ​ The seek-sorrow frowns at delights And bids you furrow also. I know those who are so. Perhaps you do, too. ​ But may we not be beckoned By the small, clear, Autumn sky And the tide of leaves rushing towards us And the mourning dove’s strange, creaky-winged flight? ​ Are such glories to be ignored So that we may not distract from suffering? Perhaps there is room enough for both In our unbounded consciousness. ​ For, in truth, the sorrows need no seeking And neither do the joys.  by Olivia Hajioff

My son saunters to the car, shoulders bent, hair dyed an audacious red. He opens the passenger door and climbs inside wearing a metal spiked collar and leather jacket in June alongside the "F*** you" attitude of adolescence. As we drive I make bumbling, parental attempts at connection... "How was the day love?" "Don't therapize me mom." "What do you think about____?" "I don't know mom." My chit-chat is met with a slow, silent stare. I sit back in my seat and drive, filling the car with a quiet love and untangling my tension one breath at a time. After several miles he turns to me, phone in hand, lips curled with disgust and says, "We will pass the threshold for global warming between 2027 and 2042. The point of no return. That's in this decade." He shakes his head and glares out the window at the grass laden hills rolling by. I feel his anger and the pain beneath it. I feel it now as his mother, a human caug...

“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

“What kind of life is it always to plan and do, to promise and finish, to wish for the near and the safe? Yes, by the heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want a boat I couldn't steer.” ―  Mary Oliver,  Blue Horses

As dogs Rachel B. Glaser I try a new way of imagining people  as dogs as dogs it makes sense  why anyone would be drawn to do anything  just as dogs rub themselves  in patches of grass or suddenly lick a face as dogs you can surely forgive your mother because she makes a funny dog with frilly fur and worried eyes and as a dog, is it so bad  you spend so much time recalling a certain smell or staring too long and too intently at a torn leaf in a hot tub  a dog falls ill and says nothing over time, they destroy the things they love picture whoever is giving you trouble  or whatever part of you desires more than it has then see a dog  pulling against the chain gripping his neck or barely moving under a bench watch the dog run away from everything it knows do you blame them?

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD by Denise Levertov We live our lives of human passions, cruelties, dreams, concepts, crimes and the exercise of virtue in and beside a world devoid of our preoccupations, free from apprehension—though affected, certainly, by our actions. A world parallel to our own though overlapping. We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too. Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions, our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute, an hour even, of pure (almost pure) response to that insouciant life: cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing pilgrimage of water, vast stillness of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane, animal voices, mineral hum, wind conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering of fire to coal—then something tethered in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free. No one discovers just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again into our own sphere (where we must...

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.

It is mid-morning. The sun hints at the summer months ahead, as I walk around Denver’s largest lake alongside other city goers similarly seeking a bit of nature on a fine spring day.  Couples and families dot the park, lounging on blankets and feasting on warmth. A man hurries past, gesticulating wildly to no one in particular, while talking at a fast clip to coworkers piped in through bluetooth earbuds. A young man rollerblades a languid dance while singing softly to a song only he can hear.  Runners dart past, brows furrowed with concentration.  My uttered hello's are lost amidst an array of podcasts, playlists and calls. My smile, hidden behind a cloth mask, crinkles my eyes in welcome.  I walk on. The lake narrows as it bends around its eastern edge. I round the corner and see her, standing in the center of the path, three-foot-tall on tiptoe, wearing a yellow canvas hat pulled low over ruffled curls.  Her lemony sun dress layered atop rainbow striped leggin...

My dad sat quietly on a chipped azure bench, blue eyes watching the tide like an old friend.  Weathered hands tugged at the corners of a thread-worn, teal blanket wrapped securely around shoulders, once broad and strong, now narrowed and bent. White hair and a wayward beard blew like sea foam across his face, assaulting eyes with sand, salt and curls.  My dad didn’t use to lounge on the park benches of tourist traveled beaches.  No.  He preferred unguarded waters and abandoned stretches of sand on which to rest his chronically tan and muscular body. At ninety, his feet no longer walked with their former ease on the unsteady shoreline, so he sat instead, listening to a distant surf with face tilted to the sun. I perched on the sand at his feet, grateful for a few hours together.  Dad opened his eyes when a pigeon landed nearby with a flutter of wings and a soft, “pruuuu, prrruuu.”  Dad watched the bird pecking at the sand.  Soon more pigeons arrived and...

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...

Listen to the story told by the reed, of being separated. “Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back. At any gathering I am there, mingling in the laughing and grieving, a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden within the notes. No ears for that. Body flowing out of spirit, spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing. But it’s not given us to see the soul. The reed flute is fire, not wind. Be that empty.” Hear the love fire tangled in the reed notes, as bewilderment melts into wine. The reed is a friend to all who want the fabric torn and drawn away. The reed is hurt and salve combining. Intimacy and longing for intimacy, one song. A disastrous surrender and a fine love, together. The one who secretly hears this is senseless. A tongue has one customer, the ear. A sugarcane flute has such effect because it was able to make sugar in the reedbed. ...

Distance is an illusion. We stand apart so that we may know each other better.

  “Te tiro atu to kanohi ki tairawhiti ana tera whiti te ra kite ataata ka hinga ki muri kia koe.”  – Maori saying which translates “Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.”

A month ago Bodhi came into the kitchen with my phone in hand and said, "Listen Mom, I want to put you on a dating app."  I balked.  He countered, "Just listen a minute, with Owen gone and me growing up you just don't have much connection anymore.  You deserve to be loved mom.  We don't want you to be alone."   I hugged him and took my phone, on which he'd already downloaded some app called Hinge. I deleted it.  He asked me to think about it.  I did.  I even tried eHarmony for a few weeks.  I went on a few masked and distanced dates.   Here's what I learned: I DO NOT LIKE DATING APPS.   I probably don't much like dating.  I don't like cocktail parties either.  I'm easily overwhelmed by human maneuverings and terrible at small talk.  I am also not an easy chemistry or person to match. I feel life fully and don't consider that a weakness.  After years of relationship mishaps,  I am only interested in dating so...

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

12  You will go out in joy      and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills      will burst into song C )" style="line-height: normal; position: relative; vertical-align: text-top; top: auto;">  before you, and all the trees  of the field      will clap their hands. Isaiah 55:12

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

  Christmas  Love 2020 Love. We're all here, at this perceived threshold of Eden, learning about love.  Love’s Beginning:   Initially we fall in love with a projected self-image of perfection and the projected self-image of perfection in the other. But that's not really love, that's Narcissus adoring his reflection on the lake's surface. Real love continually expands to include the messy, awkward, unpredictable, unresolved, lived experience of individuation within systems of disrupted belonging.  Love’s Ripening:    Our cultural preoccupation with the earliest stage of love is a kind of disconnection. It's visible in our branded self image on Instagram and how we are encouraged to shut down emotionally. It's visible in our schools and prison systems, in our corporate capitalism and politics, in how we treat those in need and how we deify beauty and youth. And unfortunately this superficiality of love can be most visible during the holiday sea...

The deed took all my heart. I did not think of you, Not ’til the thing was done. I put my sword away And then no more the cold And perfect fury ran Along my narrow bones And then no more the black And dripping corridors Hold anywhere the shape That I had come to slay. Then for the first time, I saw in the cave’s belly The dark and clotted webs, The green and sucking pools, The rank and crumbling walls, The maze of passages. And I thought then Of the far earth, Of the spring sun And the slow wind, And a young girl, And I looked then At the white thread. Hunting the minotaur I was no common man And had no need of love. I trailed the shining thread Behind me, for a vow, And did not think of you. It lay there, like a sign, Coiled on the bull’s great hoof. And back into the world, Half blind with weariness I touched the thread and wept. O, it was frail as air, And I turned then With the white spool Through the cold rocks, Through the black rocks. Through the long webs, And the mist fell, An...

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;     For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings     That then I scorn to change my state with kings.