I am light and shadow I am bird and worm I am warmth and coldness I am peace and war I am beauty and ugliness I am laughter and tears I am joy and grief I am energy and tiredness I am friend and foe I am comfort and pain I am whole and broken I am giving and withholding I am embracing and rejecting I am forgiving and grudging I am remembering and forgetting I am releasing and grasping I am goodness and evil I am believer and atheist I am love and hate I am unity and division I am now and yesterday I am eternal and ephemeral I am holy and ordinary I am connected and separate I am I and not-I I am who I am Wondrously human Wondrously heavenly Light and shadow Completely me Only with all of me Can I know Divine oneness
Year: 2023
Rain Poem
I recorded a poem last night A poem by nature After a too-bright Too-hot Too-sticky July day Came the rain poem Punctuated With thunder and lightning Softening Cooling Breathing God’s grace For our garden
To See God
To see God in others Is spectacularly easy As long as I carefully chose Whom I look at With some, it is hard NOT To see God Woody, Wendy, Norma So many close friends My writing group My meditation group God is so easy to see But also That panhandler on the corner With the cardboard sign Impossible to read That scruffy panhandler Maybe, according to many friends A con artist I see God shining through him Or is it Possibly That I merely see God reflected In my easy generosity That tantruming toddler Embarrassing his mother In the aisles of the grocery store I see God in her and in her mother Or is it Possibly That I merely see God reflected In my easy compassion My often complaining mother Who calls me at 10:00 at night On her cell phone To tell me her phone isn’t working I see God in her Or is it Possibly That I merely see God reflected In my easy acceptance But what about my troubled step-daughter Middle-aged Still needing her daddy Desperately His money, his help, his support What about the needy young friend Who lived with us for a year Whom we supported through Recovery from the trauma of COVID nursing Who left angrily the first time We needed a boundary I blew it I yelled at both of them Ugly hurtful yelling No generosity No compassion No acceptance No reflection of my own goodness In which to see God Help me, please, dear Goddess Mother To see You in them In their neediness And even in me In my ugliness
Meditation
Silence is not silence Until I slip below thought My thoughts Are often troubled Wind whipped waves That drown Possible worlds Beneath the swallowing waves I sink into the cool quiet depths I find a rock to cling to Strange that I do not need to breathe I do not die Nor do I grow gills I simply sit In the dark cool depths Holding onto the rock The rock that keeps me still Keeps me from floating back up Into the never ending storm Hurricane tornado tempest cyclone Of my thoughts Thoughts that create and destroy Faster than I can grasp Thoughts that drown me In impossibilities I cling to my rock Not as in psalms or hymns My rock is not God Because that requires thought And thought is the world killer So I sit quietly in the cool depths While worlds of thoughts whirl overhead I neither breath nor grow gills I neither believe nor disbelieve I neither create nor destroy I sit in dark stillness Resting against my rock
Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down
My anger burned hot A sudden flare One too many lightning strikes Burrowed into the underbrush Of my willing heart One too many lightning strikes Hit the tall trees Of my good intentions Smouldering underbrush burst Into heaven-bent flames Where bright burning treetops Met them In an all-consuming white-hot blaze Now Days later Blackened with soot Eyes watering from smoke I bend to read the ashes Hoping for hope
Remembering Gordon
**Twenty years ago today my husband, Gordon, slipped deeper into a coma. He died at dawn on July 5, 2003.**
The poetry prompt births an ear worm “These are a few of my favorite things” And with that worm My mind burrows deep Into the rich darkness of the song that Rodgers wrote For the film version After Hammerstein was dead Often gloomy, depressive But so incredibly talented He wrote music and lyrics Of the gazebo song “Something Good” That was the song I sang to Gordon As we drove to the beach For the last time Just a month before he died Arwen Who hadn’t yet decided Her life was better without me in it Was in the back seat We shed no tears as I sang But we all knew we were each crying Into the silence after I softly sang the last lines Out of tune, and with wandering notes, no doubt As I am no singer Into that forever beyond now silence Arwen said, “Oh mom” Gordon squeezed my hand I leaned my head against the window And kept my eyes on the road ahead To the beach and beyond
A possible interpretation
This morning, as usual on Sunday, I read the prescribed readings for the Catholic liturgy. And I reflected on these lines from Matthew 10:37-39
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
And I wonder if these lines might be rewritten for our times and culture as
“When your ego is invested in your past more than in your now, you are not at rest in divinity;
and when your ego is invested in your future more than in your now, you are not at rest in divinity;
and whoever does not accept spiritual darkness,
as Jesus did, is not at rest in divinity,
Whoever treasures their ego will lose their true selves,
and whoever loses their ego in divine oneness will find their true selves.”
Midwives of Divinity
“The world is pregnant with God!” Angela of Foligno Can we care for Mother Earth Gravid with God As we care for pregnancies In others? In ourselves? Once When my oldest was very young And very angry with me He said “When I’m grown up And you are little I am going to be mean to you.” He thought we would seesaw Back and forth Between old and young Him and me Forever God created us Birthed this world Now it is our turn To midwife God’s birth But we are careless We humans Midwives of the Divine Too often Too much The Divine fetus struggles Its umbilical cord Choked with smoke With plastic With money With indifference With disbelief Will Mother Earth miscarry? Are we to be abortionists Of the Divine fetus?
Hope and Dog Shit
Hope may be For some The thing with wings Flying into the distance Or even the sprouts From the eyes of a potato Growing into the future Hope For me Today Is sitting on the back porch Watching Woody Move around the yard His old man body stooped and slow With shovel and some other tool A long handled scraper kind of thing One in each hand To pick up the daily offerings Of the two dogs Hope is simply Wanting the same Tomorrow And the next day With Woody
Getting to Peace and Comfort
Woody and I just watched the second episode of Shiny Happy People. I am a 75 year old “cradle Catholic.” While growing up in pre-Vatican II southern Catholicism was far from Gothard’s IBLP, it was not that far.
So I was very aware, while watching, that even 5 years ago, I could not have watched that episode without struggling with panic, hatred, sadness, guilt, and remorse, all bundled together in one huge overwhelming confusing package called faith.
Tonight I am thankful for one thing. I am thankful that I now understand that there are realities that I can neither think nor feel my way through. Both paths led to a frightening jungle that kept me largely trapped inside my own thoughts and feelings for too much of my life. I did not know how to pay attention to the external world when it took all I had to control the noise and chaos of my internal world.
I still loved the presentation and liturgies of the Divine that I grew up with, much as I love comfort foods from my childhood (like hot dogs and canned baked beans – neither of which is the kind of food that I typically enjoy). But then my mind reminded me of some of the doctrines and teachings that were at best ludicrous and at worst grooming. And so I was left feeling that the Divine was unreachable, dangerous even. But I wanted to be close to a God I could no longer believe in, and so I pretty much lived within a spiritual/psychological preoccupying inadequacy.
I have practiced yoga for 55 years now. So savasana, yoga nedra, and pranayama were my first introduction to meditation. They helped immensely, but I still longed for my spiritual comfort food.
And that is what the practice of contemplative prayer gives me: both the peace of meditation and the comfort of being within a familiar pattern of the Divine. This is why contemplative prayer is such an unimaginable blessing to me.
Meditation is hard work for me. So is contemplative prayer. But it is hard for natural reasons. It is hard like growing up, like “adulting” is hard. It is not hard because it is tearing me apart from the inside out.
I am slowly learning that thoughts won’t get me to the Divine and emotions won’t get me to the Divine, but the Divine can get me to coherent thoughts and controllable emotions.
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