There is a secret about our lives hidden in our days and dreaming nights. It lies before us having been born when we were born and began. It is the path where no one has ever gone and no one will ever go again, the one we make for ourselves each moment when we think no one knows or cares. Each step a choice among the thousand choices picking our way through briars and brambles on a way that once seemed clear and straight but now we are lost on tortuous holy grounds. We find ourselves in the thrall of liminal space held within the arms of broken time where the past flies fast away where what comes we cannot always choose. Shall we believe in the lives we've led given all arguments to the contrary? We must. We must hold to the way we began when we fell from darkness into light. We do not know the secret cause travelling with us through our days though it is ours alone, our dear companion, cherished and named - our soul. ___________________________________________________________________ Portland, Oregon - April 25, 2022 This, from Joseph Campbell in "Thou Art That, Transforming Religious Metaphor:" "The secret cause of your death is your destiny. Every life has a limitation, and in challenging the limit you are bringing the limit closer to you, and the heroes are the ones who initiate their actions no matter what destiny may result. What happens is, therefore, a function of what the person does. This is true of life all the way through. Here is revealed the secret cause: your own life course is the secret cause of your death."
Death
Memorial
They lie in green fields lost and lone
washed in dark oceans and cold seas
in rice paddies and river bends
on golden beach strands and in the coves
rocky and cool in the shadows.
No headstones or markers remain
but the overarching trees, the headland stones
whereon last they laid their heads, unknowing.
Snowdrift prayers over whitened bones
dunes of drifting sand under which they lie.
The breathing and breathtaking world
is memorial for all the fallen, taken away
who become again grainy mineral and spirit.
They now and still extend the forgiveness of death
to the millions more who will die in senseless war.
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Portland, Oregon – May 30, 2021.
From Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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.
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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.)
In Cascadia 