angelbirdflies

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected on the deep.” William James

  A tree. Is there such a thing? In Genesis, God got busy naming things, well not directly, but the big G got the ball rolling with that famous opening line, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And shit started happening. The whole Heaven/Earth thing linked by that mischievous word, “ and ”, simultaneously joined and separated the whole shebang in a single breath. Things got complicated after that. God passed the buck to man, giving “him” authority to name things with the caveat that, “Whatever [he] called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). Arguably things have been going downhill ever since. The naming of a thing prioritizes our conceptual rhetoric over an experiential encounter. It’s not conscious, it's just how our conditioned brains work. For there to be an up there has to be a down . For there to be a right there must be a wrong . A tree naturally presupposes a “ not tree ”. The naming itself provides a cognitive framework for sepa...

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...

I've been feeling the weight of loneliness a lot lately and doing my best to befriend it rather than resist or harden or numb. How? Good question. I've tried many things but the thing that is working best is to focus my gaze on this moment and this one and this, knowing I have all I need to meet this ever changing instant. Here's what I mean: Today was hot. I went to the gym and after my workout I stepped out of the air-conditioned rooms and into an eighty degree day. It took my breath away. I stood still, transfixed by an overwhelming sensation of warm air caressing cool skin. I closed my eyes to inhale the last days of summer like an embrace so sweet and complete it left no room for lonely. Of course the feeling didn't last forever. Feelings never do. But it did last long enough for me to feel held. And that was enough. I know many of you are also feeling the shadow of loneliness after a pandemic year, a social shut down, a continual influx of fractious ne...

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. ...

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