I wake in the morning to darkness beyond the clock and shade. Weary from sleep, knowing the time, I throw back warm covers, step onto the cold floor to make my way into the lingering gloom of the gray day that remains just the shadow of night. In this season we will dress up darkness in bright lights, adorn it in green wreaths accompanied by songs and bright laughter until we forget from where we came where we are going and who we are. There are those who do not ever forget. Angels seek our hidden and unspoken souls, desirous to gather up all we left behind - a friend, a failure, a love we did not well love - when, afraid, we tried to banish darkness. I have had my dark days, remembered, that I cannot take back and make light. Perhaps I may, as this season's offering, lay them all upon the table of night and for them, offer thanks and praise. ___________________________________________ Portland, Oregon - November 8, 2021
Holy Seasons
Prayer
Often, mornings I sit with wild birds
who poke about among fallen leaves
gathering what our bit of earth provides.
To them I offer a human greeting: “Hello!
How do you fare this day, going about?”
Older now, forgetting my youthful doubts
I have expectant hope of twittered replies
as they’ve come grudgingly to know me
as one who sits under our cedar tree
a tweet, perhaps, from a nearby chickadee.
No less do I hope that when I pray
for you, thinking mercy, grace, and love –
healing in your moments of human need –
that mercy, grace, and love will find you.
Just so, because we share a part in life,
becomes fixed between us an anchored cord
pegged to sacred ground, pinned fast
to a round and boundless eternal realm.
__________________________________________________________________________
Portland, Oregon – March 3, 2021
Ashes Eve
Tonight, ashes eve.
Tomorrow, ashes drawn
feeling them there
where I cannot see them.
Not this year. This isolation.
No one will spread oily ashes
in the sacred sanctuary.
I will remember them –
ashes of yesteryears –
gritty scrape and black
and find myself, again,
looking to the saving season.
Lent. Remembrance, remorse
for the sick and the dying.
Salvation out of suffering –
born of darkness, like life
escaping the jaws of death.
_________________________________________________________________________
Portland, Oregon – February 16, 2021. Eve of Ash Wednesday in the Catholic liturgical year.
The Dead
At the end of the year I shall think about the dead –
death and the dead, thousands of thousands
who should not be dead but alive but are not.
They are not here. We have lost them
and they will not return to us, not in this land
in this realm of creatures moving among shadows.
What do they see, the dead who lonely died
in sanitized sick beds, surrounded not
by their family or friends but tubes and screens
pulsing beeping whirring digital machines;
by sacred scared nurses who little knew
of the lives they led in these exhausted wheezing bodies?
And what do they see who, without tender care, lay
in their homes, trembling and confused, and then go away?
What do they see, now that they are no more with us
no more living in the lovely and fertile land of home?
They look back, moments on their death beds,
and on their away journey, to where they lived
to see the heartaches of who walked with them,
sang or danced with them, and even, even
birds on branches who saw them through windows.
Now they see with death’s eyes the consoling beauty,
the inconsolable transience of frail human life
passing by as if on sailing ships and night trains.
They have another journey ahead of them.
Their hearts, the hearts of the dead, feel
the weight of their passing away and know
there is nothing more they can do but love,
hold dear all they knew or forgot or never knew.
It is the land of the lost they leave as they go
into the swirl of the planet’s swing among the stars.
Yet, all is not lost to them. They know and remember.
More even than love perhaps, they forgive.
What more can they to do but forgive – all of it!
Let it slip slide away into the jeweled dark night –
the imperfections, injustices, violations
inflicted by everyone who little understood
though they tried and tired themselves in trying
hoping for their own moments of sweet love and grace.
Even the blue and green world confounded them
for they could not possess or fathom how gracious,
lovely, and holy was the place that held their crib and coffin.
They see what in life they could not see.
Overwhelmed in death they mourn for the living,
contemplate suffering – all they loved,
who loved them not, each day seeking to become real,
to heal what in them was lost and was broken.
What more for the dead but to see and in seeing
to stretch disappearing hands to all –
all who gave them life, who came before them,
generations of souls who stopped a moment
to look back and wept for those who remained,
comforted them in their heartsick grieving
and breathed on them one last breath
their final gift, their last token of life and
breathless, walked off into the shadowless light.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Portland, Oregon – December 30, 2020
“…and all such things must be utterly clear to the dead. They have finally left the problematical cloudy earthly and human sphere. I have a hunch that in life you look outward from your ego, your center. In death you are at the periphery looking inward.” (Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, p. 10; Penguin Books, 2008.)
Following the Star
Over this troubled land winter is settling
with it’s mystical bright star wandering
the heavens in celestial movement
designed to guide sojourners on their way.
I feel it’s tug at my own true and exalted nature,
it’s sudden pushes and swift kicks, and try,
fitfully, to align my orbit with its stellar path –
and yet….
I’ve reasons for dark fear and cold resentment
thinking of my lost country and it’s fractured souls.
I struggle to hold on to what, when I was young,
I learned in school, in church and, through the years,
tried to practice when I wrote, worked, played, and loved.
It is not simple to uncover, buried
in teachings, rules, sermons, and books,
the lessons best to keep close and careful guard.
Countless are the numbers of those who,
in times and places, walked with me on the way.
Some have stayed by me through the years
and some stayed not long enough though from each
I learned a lesson or failed to learn and left and lost.
I have often wandered from the path
that follows that rogue and roving star.
Always it has sought to seek and save me
wherever I came from or where I was going –
from Lake Huron’s shore to my home here
where I can almost hear the Columbia river roll
in riffles and rapids to the Pacific realm.
Yes. I’ve reasons for dark fear and cold resentment
thinking of my lost country and it’s fractured souls.
Yet, over the land and the souls of the land
hangs the luminous star without name or creed.
It sings in the darkness of this winter season.
I listen for it through the dark nights.
I wait for it’s song sung by the winter rains.
Follow. Follow. Follow.
This it seems to say but says no more.
_________________________________________________________
Portland, Oregon – December 16, 2020
The Forest Adventurous*
Advent.
Adventure.
________________________________________________
I stand in the realm of pale winter’s light
at the entrance to a deep forest darkness
without scrying sign, portending trail,
or vanishing point to guide my way.
The winter solstice is near. It promises, always,
short lit days, long dark hours, hints of snow.
Confused and worn memories tug at my coat;
expectations, desperate to steer my steps,
clutch at my ankles, grab my cuffs, pull on my belt.
The hidden path in front of me waits patient,
without fear, demand, or remorse.
I feel it’s invitation from out of the darkness –
whispers, voices, songs, blown by winds
near me, around me, in me.
Portland, Oregon – Season of Advent, December 6, 2020
Joseph Campbell relates a passage from La Queste del Saint Graal regarding the Arthurian myth and the beginning of the Knight’s quest for the Holy Grail: “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path. You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there’s a way or path, it is someone else’s path; each human being is a unique phenomenon.'” (Pathways to Bliss, p. xxvi.)
The Spirit
The Spirit blows where she wills.
I believe I hear her voice…
I cannot see her.
I turn in circles, round and round,
waiting on whispers in the wind
wisdom seeking, beseeching…
her warm breath.
This is the how it is for us
who wake with wind in our ears –
born of the Spirit.
She called us then.
She will call us again.
Portland, Oregon – Feast of Pentecost, May 31, 2020
The Gospel of John, 3:8, the “original” version: “The Spirit blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, and you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Viral Morning
Morning rises in day speckles
multifaceted green hue and blend.
Trees tall of evergreen break
the blue sky into silhouettes –
pointy pine needle etchings
carved into patches of bright sky
still cold from the chill night.
All in a spring morning –
bird call, little girl scream
delighted bike riding fast
leaving parents behind on the road.
Verdant vegetative bursting, virus
spreading, water seeping down
to seas and shadowy depths.
Morning and the green filtered
sky cannot hold the silence –
waiting and fear falling as rain.
I hold these in my own green life
through this lovely and cold
viral spring morning.
Portland, Oregon – May 6, 2020
Shifting World
When the world shifts
I must shift
or walk along the road
where time has gone.
My tasks and the world
shift under pressure –
when a small thing,
a stone in a shoe,
stops the big things.
Tasks remain to do
when the sun rises.
When night comes
I lay them down
to sleep and dream.
Portland, Oregon – April 8, 2020
We Bloom
In cold springtime
we poke up sun reaching
drink frosty rain
bloom with flowers.
Other live things bloom
grow across the world
become part of vibrant life
cause sickness and death.
Little different we
from viral living beings.
We infect the world
cause sickness and death.
Before me the horizon blooms
with life never imagined.
Oh, to bask in the light
before sickness and death.
Portland, Oregon – March 24, 2020
The worldwide pandemic (Coronavirus, Covid 19) is currently ravishing the world.
In Cascadia 