Amazing Peace

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to
avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done
to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension,
Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness
high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence
and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged
as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth,
brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches,
breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft.
Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now.
It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound.
We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war.
But true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

- Maya Angelou

Mothered

At sixteen I bought my first bird book,
a small green hardback, whose binding I broke
turning countless times its pages of color,
striking orange and black of oriole,
the azure sea shade of bluebird, red ember
iridescence of hummingbird’s throat,
fluttering in my hands for nearly forty years.

The year birds entered my life was
the same year my mother left it.
The woman who carried my brother and me
deep into Nature. Camping under the sun
drizzled scent of redwoods, wandering
wave tossed tidepools at ocean’s edge.

She’d pack the blue 54 Ford station wagon
every summer, to journey into wildness,
the expanses of the American West
to take in its beauty, as if through skin.
Laying our young and tender bodies
on the land, connecting us thread
by invisible thread to the earth’s intricate web.

So when her heart suddenly stopped
that summer, I was away at biology camp
discovering birds, and she slipped from the world
long before I wanted to let her go. I remained
tethered to the Earth, cradled by the great mother,
and birds became messengers
dropping from the heavens
to lift my spirits on a thousand wings,
embracing me with their songs.

- Suzanne Murray

The first few drafts of the poem I wrote through tears and beyond helping to clear the archival grief I was carrying there was a great healing from being able to honor my mother for the gift she gave me in connecting me to Nature. Everyone on the trip whether they were skilled in the craft of poetry or not had a similar healing as we gathered together to witness each others words and experiences and share poems, both our own and the work of poets like Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Wendell Berry, Rumi, Hafiz, Naomi Shihab Nye and William Stafford who touch the human heart.

Like other forms of sacred writings, poetry is the language of the soul interfacing with a greater source of inspiration so that a good poem can stir us in ways our conscious mind may not always be aware of. We can feel the poem in our own body and soul and sense the power of the words taking us deeper into what really matters. Reading and writing poems certainly helps to anchor me in these changing times and it can inspired other forms of creativity as well.

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to
avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done
to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension,
Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness
high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence
and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged
as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth,
brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches,
breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft.
Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now.
It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound.
We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war.
But true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

- Maya Angelou

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

~ John O’Donohue ~

(From To Bless the Space Between Us)

At that point I had the sense that finding the right poem that speaks to what we are going through can hold us in a place of comfort, healing and deeper understanding of a challenge or difficulty in our life. It can be like writing a prescription for yourself knowing that words can heal.

If you are new to poetry and not accustomed to reading it then start with the highly accessible poets like the Sufi mystic poets like Rumi or Hafiz or best selling contemporary poets like Mary Oliver or Billy Collins. Below are a couple of ones that are a good place to begin. Or try writing your own poem. Be willing to relax and play with it.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means

-Billy Collins

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattail
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Robert Bly)

The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it’s time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.
We drift through this gray, increasing
nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

- John O’Donohue

Weathering

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wants to be seen
with a passable woman.
But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look or if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that all.
My hair will grow gray in any case,
,my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all the usual changes.
If my face is to be weatherbeaten as well,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

-Fleur Adock

Ripening Barberries

Already the ripening barberries are red
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
the man who is not rich now that summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision inside,
simply waiting for nighttime
to rise all around him in darkness -
it’s all over for him, he’s like an old man.

Nothing else will come: no more doors will open
and everything that does have will cheat him
even You, my God. And You are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

A Spiritual Journey

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

- Wendell Berry

Landscape

Isn’t it plain that the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they want

about spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors to my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning so far I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky – as though

all night they have thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

- Mary Oliver

New England poet and essayist Donald Hall calls poetry, The Unsayable Said, referring the ineffable quality of poetry; the way it gives voice to experiences that are beyond words. I always think of poetry as something written by the soul for the soul. This is why I find it best to read a poem for the felt sense it offers, allowing the experience of the words to wash over you without necessarily having to understand them with your conscious mind.

Poet Robert Pinsky in his two year term as U.S. Poet Laureate established the Favorite Poem Project. In traveling around the country promoting poetry in town hall style meetings where people came together to share their favorite poems written by someone else he found that everyone, from the members of the corporate board room to the janitorial staff, all had a poem that had really influenced their life. Poet David Whyte, author of The Heart Aroused: the Preservation of the Soul in Corporation, who uses poetry to talk about the life of the soul in the workplace has consulted for major corporation including Boeing, Xerox and IBM. The person who invited David to bring his work into the corporation had explained that there was no language in the corporate world for the kind of real changes that need to take place but that he heard that language in David’s use of poetry.

I think in this time of tremendous change in the world today, poetry holds for us a timeless wisdom and language that provides an awareness of what is really important about the essence of the human experience and our connection to something bigger than ourselves. By way of example I’ve included below four of my favorite poems by poets spanning nine centuries and spawned by different parts of the world; beginning with Rumi, the 13th century Persian Sufi mystic, then German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who lived 1749 to 1832,  then  Nobel Prize winning Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, 1881 – 1958 and finally Nobel Prize winning Poet Derek Walcott from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean born in 1930. I encourage you to savour each one, let the words enter your heart and feel poetry’s power to transform and inspire.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher love-making
Sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
And, finally, insane for the light,
You are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing…..silence…..Waves…..
—-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

- Juan Ramon Jimenez

Love After Love

The day 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,
saying, ‘Sit here. Eat. You will love again
the stranger who was yourself.’

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

-Derek Walcott